The Legends - Over and Over (Album)

Let us get one thing out of the way from the off; The Legends is a terrible name for a band. It conjures up images of landfill Britpop revivalists, paunchy 35 year-old blokes down your local, playing Stone Roses covers convinced they are the reincarnation of Saint Gallagher.

But it seems the band’s mainstay Johan Angergård is a very busy chap indeed, serving time in two other bands and having founded Labrador Records, home of many of Sweden’s leading pop luminaries, so perhaps we can forgive him this one. Perhaps he just didn’t have enough time to pick a good name for his band (which is really just Angergård’s own project, in spite of his lurid claims of having 8 others in the band). Fortunately for our Johan, his musical talents are far more on the button than his ability to pick out an appropriate moniker.

Having left us in 2006 with Facts and Figures, a highly enjoyable record of dreamy pop laced through with electro touches, he’s back with Over and Over, a very different animal indeed.
Over and Over keeps up Angergård’s unerring knack with a pop song, but replaces the electronic influences with the occasional blast of a quality more akin to New York’s favourite ear-splitters A Place to Bury Strangers. And you know what? He’s on to a winner.

The album starts off innocently enough with ‘You Won’, a gorgeous piece of slightly distorted blissful pop. It’s not until the album’s second song ‘Seconds Away’ that you are hit by that fantastic squealy feedback, which carries in into the next track ‘Always the Same’. Underneath the noise on this song is some lovely boy-girl vocal interplay.

And from then on, the album is a schizophrenic beast, veering repeatedly between sugary pop prettiness (‘Monday to Saturday’ being the best example of this), and this incredible abrasive racket which reaches its zenith on ‘Recife’. No matter how much feedback adorns the songs, however, pop hooks are always evident.

Very occasionally the album arrives at a mid-point between the extremes of clamour and bliss, and these are the moments which arguably see it at it’s best. In the last year, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart have laid down the marker for dreamy ‘80s influenced indie pop, but songs like the aforementioned ‘ You Won‘, ‘Dancefloor’ and ‘Touch’ compare favourably with anything on their album.

Over and Over couldn’t be timed better. It deserves to be as well received as the new shoegaze bands that have paved the way for it. It may suffer slightly from a lack of cohesiveness born from trying to cram a few too many ideas in, but in world where a depressingly large number of artists play it safe, The Legends should be canonized for having such a sense of ambition.