Review: Watchhouse Delivered an Intimate Music Experience to St. Louis

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Steve Leftridge

Watchhouse is mandolinist Andrew Marlin and guitarist/fiddler Emily Frantz .

When writing about Watchhouse, do we still have to mention that the duo was formerly known as Mandolin Orange? Well, I for one refuse to make note of it, and I will also not speculate that the name change had something to do with Donald Trump’s skin tone. 

In any case, the band’s current name refers to an isolated cabin on the Chesapeake Bay that mandolinist Andrew Marlin visited as a teenager. Free of any electricity or phone lines, the Watchhouse was a place that allowed for peaceful reflection and genuine connections. Last night, the Sheldon became the Watchhouse. 

Indeed, last night the North Carolinian duo of Marlin and guitarist/fiddler Emily Frantz — a couple on stage and off — did things the old-fashioned way: face-to-face acoustic music making, pairing gentle mandolin and guitar and fiddle while blending honeyed vocal harmonies over wistful, bucolic Americana. 

Frantz announced early on that the band had not played in St. Louis in four years. While municipally factual, a murmur was audible from those in the crowd who saw Watchhouse two summers ago at the Open Highway Music Festival in Chesterfield. 

Still, both musicians have made some pronounced follicular modifications since we last saw them. Frantz has dyed half of her hair blonde, Cruella-style, as though her left side has more fun, which makes sense as that’s the side she keeps her fiddle on. Marlin has, somewhat miraculously, grown his hair past his shoulders — good for headbanging. 

Marlin isn’t much of a rocker, but there was a banged head or two when he stretched out on some mandolin breaks, as close as Watchhouse comes to jamming. Marlin enjoys a thin plectrum, so these aren’t forceful Sam Bush-y solos; he plays instead with a light touch in Chris Thilian fashion with clean, melodic solos, and the audience last night exploded as though they’d never heard the likes of it. 

“This is a lively crowd for a Sunday night,” Frantz observed after one such outburst. 

Sheldon audiences typically represent St. Louis music lovers on their best behavior, and last night was no different, though the desire to over-participate among some hardcore Watchhouse fans — Housekeepers, let’s call them — was palpable.

When Marlin sang-spoke the title of “Wildfire,” one fan screamed as though she’d been licked by it. When Marlin flubbed a verse on “Wolves,” someone robustly cued him with the correct lines. As the duo reemerged for their encore, some incorrigible dude in front of me yelled, “Freebird!” as his date elbowed him to stop. (Girlfriend, run.)

It was Palm Sunday, so the audience celebrated by slapping their palms together whenever possible, keeping time for instance during a car-window-steaming romp through “An Irish Party in Third Class,” the Titanic steerage band jig. It was one of only three songs to feature Frantz’s fiddle, along with a gorgeous “Golden Embers” and “Daylight,” in which her drowsy circle-bowing parachuted into the middle of Marlin’s reedy vocal lines. 

Yes, Watchhouse’s stripped folk and graceful alt-country is gentle and soothing by design — Marlin and Frantz barely open their mouths when singing — but their heartfelt versecraft is wrapped in tight harmonies, which resonated across the old wooden seats and stained glass of the Sheldon, a perfect sonic warmth for the room’s famous acoustics. 

The pair rotated in four different instrumental configurations with Frantz playing guitar and fiddle while Marlin swapped mandolin for guitar or octave mandolin. In all forms, the instrumentalists had nowhere to hide with music this delicately rendered, and songs like “Belly of the Beast” and “Nightbird” played to a hushed, enraptured room. 

“We have one banger for you,” Frantz said as a way of introducing one of their best-loved songs, “Old Ties and Companions,” which, sure enough, turned into the night’s longest and loudest number, giving Marlin the most room to improvise, though his tremolo playing as Frantz sang “Upside Down” later was another showcase for Marlin’s mando-lore-ian deftness. This is the way. 

The main set ended with the Mandolin Orange-era “Blue Ruin,” a Christmas song that contains a magic chord in the verse and coalesces into a meditation on gun violence, a message that hit powerfully in the wake of last week’s school shooting in Nashville. 

As the song echoed in the Sheldon, it occurred to me that the big, glossy CMT Awards in Nashville was happening at the same moment, as rapper-turned-country artist Jelly Roll and classic-rock glitz dominated the broadcast.

In appropriate contrast, Watchhouse returned to the stage for an encore of two of their countriest songs, “Hey Stranger” and “Waltz About Whiskey,” a fitting bit of cosmic Americana filled with twilight textures to wrap up an intimate musical experience.