The Black Watch 'Tatterdemalion' album

The Black Watch is possibly the most faithful approximation of yesteryear shoegaze yet. Many bands have tried, but have failed to approximate the echoes of fallen heroes like Ride and Swervedriver as well as The Black Watch does. Perhaps it's because the band has released over 10 records over the course of almost 20 years. This experience helps their latest, Tatterdemalion, feel less like mere genre pandering and more like seasoned veterans getting together for a longplayer of big, swirly guitar-pop songs. Not only that, but frontman John Andrew Fredrick is an English Ph.D, providing his catchy, oft-gorgeous sonics with some aptly wordy and poetic lyrical diversions. Definitely worth a listen if recent treats like Asobi Seksu sparked your interest and attention. All tracks clean.

Biography
John Andrew Fredrick became an artist by accident--literally. When he was 10, the sports-mad Santa Barbara boy was about to score a touchdown in a pickup tackle football game when he felt two hands on his shoulders pulling him down from behind. His left tibia was broken so badly that he had to spend a year in bed with a cast that started at his toes and blitzed right up to his hip.

His parents' policy before the accident was that he was not permitted to watch more than one hour of television per day; and, despite the fact that Fredrick now had, to say the least, lots of time on his hands, his mom and dad weren't about to alter their anti-idiotbox policy. The indefatigable leader of the going-on-seventeen-years-now Los Angeles indie pop outfit the black watch had been taking guitar lessons from a hippie chick from nearby Montecito; now bedridden and home schooled, Fredrick read the Encyclopedia Britannica from A-Z, and scads of novel and books on the Civil and Revolutionary Wars; he studied German, French and Spanish; he listened, as he claims he does today, obsessively to The Beatles; he practiced guitar till his fingers bled.

Now, 17 years after he started recording, and three decades after he started writing songs in bed, on a Sears Silvertone guitar, John Andrew Fredrick is poised to get the sort of recognition that so many boutique indie mags have been predicting for him for yonks.

Which brings us to Tatterdemalion, the new record. Though Fredrick won't go so far as to state that it's his masterpiece, the best of the eight full-lengths he's put out, he will rather decorously venture to say that it's his favorite. He coyly suggest that though Tatterdemalion took two months to write, and twelve days to record, it took him "20 years to make!" He says that he loved it when Robert Smith (an influence he doesn't deny, and acknowledges that he has worked hard to shake off) said that when he want to "hear a good record, he makes a good record."

It's the sort of endearing arrogance John--in his own rather modest way--is entitled to not just by virtue of the reams of great press the black watch has culled over the years, but as a result of the hardships he's had to endure in order to continue to make records: a spate of member changes, myriad tiny record labels with Liliputian budgets and spotty distro, sporadic touring, and the departure in 2001 of signal violinist/guitarist/co-vocalist/girlfriend J'Anna Jacoby (who went on to play in Rod Stewart's band and who is reportedly a current member of The Dixie Chicks' touring group).

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The Black Watch - Tatterdemalion