Over and Over by The Legends

As secretive Swedish songwriter Johan Angergård has shown, the upside of fronting a band that doesn't actually exist is that you can make it do whatever you want or don't want it to do, without having to nurse the guitarist's ego or endure the new song your drummer's just written. Over the course of three albums, Angergård's faux-band concept the Legends has been variously re-imagined as 1980s-vintage indie aesthetes (2004's Up Against the Legends), dreary post-punk miserablists (2005's Public Radio) and discotheque-courting synth-popsters (2006's Facts and Figures). But, at the same time, the Legends haven't really changed at all. At the core of almost every single song is Angergård's crestfallen voice, so consistent in its ability to convey longing and so unwavering in its forlorn tenor, you'd swear it was some computer preset. Listening to the Legends' discography, one doesn't so much get the sense of an artist undergoing some gradual album-to-album evolution, but rather one that tries on and sheds stylistic dressing like paper-doll outfits. On Over and Over, this process is more arbitrary than ever, marking both a return to the live-band, fuzz-pop feel of the Legends' beloved first album and further deviations away from it: the album opens with an uncharacteristically melodramatic mope-rock anthem ("You Won", which suggests Oasis if they were more in thrall to early-80s Cure than the Beatles) before touching on breezy bongo folk ("Jump"), middle-gear motorik krautrock ("Something Strange Will Happen"), and-- when all else fails-- Psychocandied pop squall. Unfortunately for the Legends, this return to their formative mid-80s Creation Records influences arrives at a time when those same sources have been recently and thoroughly milked by The Pains of Being Crystal Stilts, and some tracks ("Always the Same", "Recife") can't help but sound like standard-issue riffs on the typical noise/pop dichotomy. But there are instances where all that unrelenting feedback plays more than a simply decorative/desecrating role: on "Seconds Away" and the beautifully brooding title track, the white-noise wash proves to be an uncanny complement for Angergård's emotionally numb vocals, like ghosts communicating through TV static; on the ecstatic garage-rock rush of "Dancefloor", Angergård's high-note vocals distort to the point of sounding Auto-Tuned, blurring the line between primal performance and studio science. But if Over and Over encourages the Legends' noisiest impulses, it also tempers the dissonance to showcase some of Angergård's most winsome songwriting since Up Against the Legends: "Monday to Saturday" is a snap-along, C86-eriffic he-said/she-said duet, and "Heartbeats" presents its confessions of pill-popping binges and panic attacks in the form of a shimmering, synth-swathed slow dance. With its abundance of obtrusive distortion and shuffle-mode stylistic shifts, Over and Over renders Angergård's as enigmatic and inscrutable a figure as ever. But after two albums that were overly reliant on precise, clinical aesthetics, the rough-edged randomness of Over and Over makes the Legends a myth worth believing in again.