I'm told that American indie rock band The Black Watch are an institution of sorts in their native Los Angeles. Living almost exactly on the opposite side of the world to LA, I have no way to prove or disprove this, but I must admit that I hadn't heard of this band when I was first given this EP to review, even though they've apparently put out more than a dozen albums, and had a career spanning over twenty years.

The band's longevity is very evident in the style of their music, which sounds like its come straight out of the grunge era. Their music is fuzzy, and all of your favourites from the era are clear influences here: Nirvana, Sonic Youth and My Bloody Valentine, to name only a few. The difference I suppose is that The Black Watch, and specifically frontman John Fredrick were actually around when this style of music was being thrashed out, and thus can't be accused of copying or being too stylistically in debt.

Which leads to the question of how The Black Watch never made it as big as those other bands, a question that 'On Another Plane' answers very well. While I'm sure he's trying his hardest, when they're audible, the vocals are just dreadful. It sounds like the vocals are being sung with nose plugs in, and being recorded through a ten dollar tape deck that the band picked up from a thrift shop. Normally I'm happy to excuse vocals that aren't one hundred percent, but in this case they're so terrible that they're distracting and keep your attention away from the rest of the music.

On the songs where the vocals are mixed back into the guitars, My Bloody Valentine, the band fare a lot better. Strawberry Girl for instance is a good quality track that sounds a lot like early Smashing Pumpkins, and Quartz Pink Cloud has echoes of Pavement and early 90s Britpop in it, two styles of music that are considered by some these days to be seriously daggy, but which I would be entirely happy to see returning.

Clearly, a band doesn't last for twenty years and almost as many albums without having a talent and a following, and it would be unfair of me to judge the band's entire career based only on the six songs on this EP. With that said, the poor production on a lot of these songs, coupled with the seriously bad vocals a lot of the time, hasn't made me all that eager to seek out the band's other work. Perhaps if I were a fan, I'd get more out of this, but as it is, it's not good for much more than a brief nostalgia kick.