Black Watch, The Vinyl Records
The lone constant of veteran California indie rock outfit the Black Watch is John Andrew Fredrick, a writer and anglophile with a Ph.D. in English from the University of California at Santa Barbara. Since the late '80s, Fredrick has released well-regarded post-punk pop/rock albums that have gained comparisons to My Bloody Valentine, the Cure, Yo La Tengo, the Smiths, Interpol, the War on Drugs, and late-'60s pop. With multiple lineup and label changes since forming the group in 1987, Fredrick's talent as a writer and skill as a musician have gone mostly unnoticed, aside from the admiration of a handful of underground journalists and a devoted fan base; he later emphasized his cult status on the career-spanning anthology, 31 Years of Obscurity: The Best of the Black Watch 1988-2019.