The black watch returns with new album next month

Varied Superstitions, the black watch's 26th album, will be released Feb. 27 through UK label Blue Matter Records. Formats include a limited edition of 300 on purple vinyl and 300 CDs, plus digital release.

At a London gig last year, the black watch frontman/songwriter/novelist/ex-English prof John Andrew Fredrick joked that he’s “a recovering Anglophile...something I’ll never recover from.”

Believing his heritage to be “a third Scottish, a third English, a third Irish”, when Fredrick formed his band in 1989, he named it after the famous Scots infantry regiment. Though a recent 23andme test has revealed him to be 98 per cent English. So much for the nod to the regiment!

“British music, history, fiction, and poetry has formed so much of who I am as an artist and a person. Especially The Beatles,” Fredrick notes from his studio in the Angeleno Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles. “The year The White Album came out, I broke my leg so badly playing American football that I had to spend eleven months in bed. I read maniacally about English History, and propped a little Silvertone acoustic on my cast and started writing songs in kiddie imitation of my heroes. That sad-at-the-time year turned out to quite profoundly if not fortuitously make me who I am.”

The new album reflects Fredrick's long-avowed attempts to make LPs that are as varied and melodic as the aforementioned legendary double LP that haunts and thrills him to this day. With Varied Superstitions’ New Order-ish title track, psychedelically majestic (and mostly backwards) experimental guitarscape No I Shouldn't, the propulsive pop drone of It Is What It Isn't, Some People Will Believe’s uptempo singalong, Your Clothes Sir evoking The Cure’s more wistful moments, to the shoegazing numbers Faze and Jolly Melancholy, the band once again reveal their diverse, ‘perennially quixotic’ ambitions.

There's a bona fide whimsical side to the oxymoronically jolly melancholy of Fredrick’s approach. The title track is evidence of how playful Fredrick can be as he chronicles all the ways in which one might defy superstition. And as the quasi-political Some People Will Believe points out, we do live in a somewhat superstitious if not fear-driven era. “But amidst the somewhat gloomy/dour nature of so many of my most upbeat songs, there are clues that one shouldn't take it all too seriously. We don’t ourselves. I mean, I can’t stand being called 'prolific'. I much prefer 'fuzzy-janglepop genius’”, Fredrick laughs as he reveals there’s another full-length and EP recorded and ready to go after this.

“Like my chum Nick Saloman and his band The Bevis Frond (who runs Blue Matter Records with Gary Urwin), I don't seem to be able to stop making records. Nor do I really want to, despite my innumerable threats to quit. I'm a quitter at heart, however. I quit teaching literature, smoking, being married, writing fiction, and teaching tennis. But music? Ah, I seem to be a recovering quitter in that realm as well.”

For more info, go to bluematterrecords.com.