On beautiful purple vinyl and limited to 300 copies pressed, the new LP (on Nick Saloman of The Bevis Frond's Blue Matter label) by Los Angeles critical darlings the black watch (their 26th!!!!) has been touted already in Mojo as a collection of "indelible melodies that unspool across 11 well-crafted songs with a mostly big-overcoat/Bunnymen/Orange Juice aesthetic" and by Shindig! as an album that "continues John Andrew Fredrick's pop confections with psych overtones, Beatlesque nudges and literate lyrics (he's a novelist as well) - plus a host of great melodies. Three glowing reviews have appeared in The Big Takeover alone this month; and more reviews expected from American Songwriter, Goldmine, and Stereogum. RIYL: The Cure, mid-period Beatles, The Bevis Frond, Guided by Voices How do you become considered a classic in any music genre or sub-genre? Is it how long you've been on the scene, how many fans or just cult fans you have, how many records you have come up with, have you been recognised by other artists, something else or all of the above? the black watch could boast with probably all of the above as one of the psych rock stalwarts still around and still recording (16 albums and EP's, maybe more, under their belt), including that recognition from other artists, in their case specifically another psych rock stalwart Nick Saloman of the Bevis Frond Fame, who just released their lates album Varied Superstitions on his Blue Matter Records. So, more specifically, what kind of psych rock are we talking about here, since the fans already know that variation here could be as colorful as those tie-die shirts that were so popular back in the late sixties when psych rock was considered to be at its prime? Actually, the musical pace here is set by the band's founder, John Andrew Fredrick and guitarist/violinist J'Anna Jacoby, who might be somewhat light here on fuzz and the heavier side of psychedelia and more focused on melody and intricate guitar runs, covering a wide ground that covers everything from XTC and The Church to Cure and Swervedriver. And it all flows with quite some ease and sense of personality, something that does present itself after almost 40 years on the music scene, and while some artists lose it after being on the scene for so long, the black watch have still got it. - Echoes and Dust.com