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From The Desk Of The Black Watch: One Uncool Genre Artist You Need to Listen To

John Andrew Fredrick has spent the last three decades as the sole constant in one of music’s most perfect and unheralded rock outfits, the black watch. Using the Beatles as a tracing template, Fredrick has applied a kitchen-sink approach to the album at hand since his 1988 debut, St. Valentine, the opening volley in a catalog that would ultimately encompass 15 albums and five EPs, all of which inspired varying levels of critical halleleujahs and a deafening chorus of crickets at the nation’s cash registers. Fredrick will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our band new feature with him.

One Uncool Genre Artist You Need to Listen To:

A fluttery and flanged-out one-chord song that builds and builds then crests with that effect that “gets” you every time—where the drums cut out and the melody soars and takes your breath with it. Sound good? Brace yourself: It’s a prog song I’m talking about here so you’re going to have to put away your sneery prejudices, if you would be so very very kind. It’s a song by one of the founders of Genesis (commence wincing, hipster-who-knoweth-all) and it’s a transcendental piece of music called “” that has virtuosic elements, yes (no pun), and stacked 12-stings and crescendos deluxe and plangent drums and it is I shouldn’t wonder going to put you in mind of Ride and Slowdive to the point where your mind’s going to be blown. Can’t tell you how much, courtesy of aforementioned Andy Creighton, this song’s meant to me. Of course, our producer, Rob Campanella of the Brian Jonestown Massacre (he does not like being footnoted as such, but that’s exactly why I’m doing i—because I love to twit him and love him and hate the band he plays in with an apostle’s passion), knew all about it, the Anthony Phillips song, when it came up in one of his and Andy’s interminable (I mean, stop talking and start overdubbing already) in-the-studio geek-out confabs. Hi, Anton Newcombe! Have all your records, I do!