With the undeniable greatness of The Concretes now unleashed upon the
world at large, it's easy to have a soft spot for straggling Stockholm
pop combos whose exact membership isn't really defined. There are
somewhere between five and nine humans kitting out for a run with The
Legends, who play an attacking brand of pop music on their debut
longplayer Up Against the Legends. With reverb-drenched
Phil-Spector-ish percussion, and delay-drenched Jesus & Mary Chain-ish
guitars, Legends leader John Angergård (a veteran of soft-hearted
sentimental-indie-pop love-ins Club 8 and Acid House Kings) happily
builds a busy wall-of-sound; their noisy, opaque tone not too dissimilar
to the sound captured by Labrador labelmates the Radio Dept., a crew of
shoegazer romanticists who use washes of delay and cascading reverb to
evoke Kevin Shields' fluff-on-the-needle sound. But The Legends, with
their brazen push-beats and liberal handclaps, seem a little like
Angergård's take on garage-revivalism; though, make no mistake, this
ain't some Hives-ian outfit of old-time-rock 'n' rollers. There are
songs here where things are very twee; although, if you're to take
that JAMC thing to heart, you could easily call such qualities a greater
evocation of the C86 aesthetic. On the album's standout song, the
relentlessly upbeat "Nothing to Be Done," The Legends bounce along
joyously amidst a thin-and-trebly mix of analog organs, handclaps, and
back-and-forth boy/girl vocals, sounding more like Velocity Girl than
"Velocity Girl." Later, they deliver "When the Day Is Done," a song
that wouldn't seem out of place on a Club 8 record, the languid pace,
soft electro-beat, gentle acoustic guitar, and tightly-harmonized vocals
adding the slow-dance moment to a sock-hop set. Across the album, the
singing is pitched into harmony by some sort of harmonizer, the effect
of using such effects drawing the album further away from any sort of
idealized notion of garage-rock, the sung syllables slurred into sleek,
robotic-sounding rhythms. These vocals essentially contrast with the
noisy guitars, but, when you get down to listening to it, you realize
how all the sound on Up Against the Legends has been just as carefully
treated. Whilst the band proclaims its members as being a bunch of
music novices knocking out songs with punk-rock indie-ness, the finished
product is a surely-produced production — the squeaks of
too-close-to-the-amp feedback on opener "Call It Out," for example, not
being random accidents of recording things live, but carefully placed
samples inserted perfectly in time by Angergård. Of course, as someone
who doesn't give a rat's ass about rock 'n' roll "authenticity," I'm happy
with all of this, The Legends' lack of rockist posing at such a poserly
pop-cultural time actually being incredibly refreshing. But, shhhhh!
I'm sure their on-the-horizon American breakthrough hinges on some
record label swallowing the Swedish Garage Rock angle hook, line, and
sinker.
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