Leírás
Rock, Indie Rock, Psychedelic, Jangle, Shoegaze,
Limited edition dupla bakelit lemez 2LP kiadvány, 2025-ös album.
Having written and released fifteen albums of sparkling, literate, jangly-distorted indie rock since his band’s inception in 1987 (as well as four works of comedic literary fiction and one book on the early films of Wes Anderson), John Andrew Fredrick found himself confronting an issue frightfully prolific types like him often face quite late in their careers: how to do something new, something different. A further dilemma: he knew he wanted to make a quiet acoustic and electric guitar record, psychedelic, of course, but with minimal drums, if any; yet he fancied writing and recording a dance record.
For All The World, the black watch’s twenty-fifth (and first double) album is a darkly poppy, brightly moody, many-splendored take on a number of the great themes: Death and Sex, Memory and Lament and Hope and Love. And it is, arguably, this heralded Los Angeles band’s most sonically ambitious and moving record yet, since front man/novelist/ex-English professor John Andrew Fredrick formed the group in 1988 in Santa Barbara after he’d seen a London-by-way-of-Canada band called The Lucy Show play to twelve-or-so people in his hometown. Having recorded 2024’s Weird Rooms with producer Misha Bullock and Fredrick’s son Chandler at Bullock’s studio in Austin, TX, the TBW founder was keen to repeat the experience with, he says, more straightforward, classic psych/jangle/shoegaze songs.
The result, though artistically satisfying, spurred a yen in John to write more songs as a sort of reaction against the batch he’d carried with him from LA to Texas. „We had such a productive time recording ‘Weird Rooms’ that I wanted to repeat the experience… without repeating the experience. And once it was over and I left Misha to do what he pleased with respect to mixing and overdubbing, all I could think was ‘I need to write another album now.'” So Fredrick brought longstanding producer/engineer and TBW-associate Scott Campbell (Stevie Nicks, Acetone) along this time to help out with engineering and good cheer. Fredrick, who has been „accused” of being „astonishingly prolific,” learned that bandmate Andy Creighton had recently become unemployed, seized the opportunity to have yet another multi-instrumentalist flesh out the new songs he quickly wrote after he came back from Austin.
“Achilles Past,” the first single, is in fact a song that John wrote when the production team thought the album was done—and the front man avers that it’s often the case that a very strong song comes to him, as it were, in the eleventh hour. The same could be said for “Listen You Wait”—another number that came late to the Austin sessions. Nevertheless, the recording of the first half of For All The World has Creighton’s signature indelibly stamped on it – especially on such tracks as “Fainting” and “Surely You Rally”– just as the latter half highlights Bullock’s formidable talents. „They’re both not just brilliant musicians and they understand my aesthetic and bring their own sensibilities to bear on my stuff. Our respective tastes meet in, you guessed it, The Beatles’ realm – the great shadow that hangs over all I do, at least.” „There’s A Place,” the final song on side two, serves in fact as a distinct homage that’s been a long time coming for a band that included a cover of „It’s All Too Much” as a bonus track and that release a quite punkish, uptempo version of „Eleanor Rigby” on a 7″.
„Achilles Past”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QParJO-rjDo
