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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 ("
You Won
The Legends
Seconds Away
The Legends
Always the Same
The Legends
Monday to Saturday
The Legends
Heartbeats
The Legends
Dancefloor
The Legends
Turn Away
The Legends
Recife
The Legends
Over and Over
The Legends
Jump
The Legends
Something Strange Will Happen
The Legends
Touch
The Legends