Legends Facts & Fiction CD - Import

Facts and Figures is the sound of complete opposites coming together perfectly. The Legends combine the military precision of Kraftwerk and DAF with soft '60s style pop melodies; a hate of dance floors with dance music and perfectionism with the naive curiosity of a beginner. Over a classic album length of 10 songs and 34:45 minutes The Legends deliver an eclectic, still amazingly kept together piece of art. Sublime! Facts and Figures is Johan Angergård's (Acid House Kings, Club 8, Poprace) 12th album and the 3rd with The Legends. Yet, it still feels as if he’s only just begun. The Legends’ curiosity and lust is obvious and they’ve stayed true to their indie ideals. Facts and Figures is very playful. The Legends experiment with brand new sounds and combine them with every brilliant pop tune they’ve ever heard and every band they’ve ever listened to. Eclectic and truly amazing! The first 1000 copies of Facts and Figures come with a bonus tour documentary DVD. It’s supposed to work as a warning for those who plan on starting a band.

Album number three, and a third entirely new direction for the Legends, who by this point no longer made any pretense of being a "mysterious" nine-piece group of unknowns rather than a one-man studio project of the prolific popsmith Johan Angergård. More than any of Angergârd's other outfits, the Legends make pop music with overt reference to other pop music, and Facts and Figures is no exception. Just for starters, the album shares its opening line with U2's The Joshua Tree, and there's at least one direct Belle & Sebastian quote in the lyrics. In a display of pure music geekery, the liner notes contain a list of recommended records, two for each year from 1974 to 2006, which reads like a road map to the touchstone obsessions evident throughout the Legends' debut (Jesus & Mary Chain, Comet Gain, Broder Daniel, presumably others had the list extended earlier) and second album (New Order, the Cure, Felt, et cetera.) (Those looking for clues to future stylistic shifts might take note that both Barry White and quirky Boston songwriter Don Lennon are featured with three albums apiece.) The inclusions most relevant to Facts and Figures span the entire time range, from Depeche Mode and Kraftwerk (the album design nods to Trans-Europe Express) through Momus and the Russian Futurists and, most pertinently, the Pet Shop Boys. To put it in other words: this is the Legends' synth pop album. It functions to some extent as a bridge between their first two, balancing the danceability and melodic exuberance of Up Against with the elegance and restraint of Public Radio, though it has neither the fuzziness of the former nor the blurriness of the later, swapping distortion and reverb for impeccably crisp electronics (and, occasionally, guitars). Perhaps because synth pop as a style, despite its knee jerk association with the new wave '80s, has remained remarkably relevant, resilient, and versatile, Facts and Figures comes off as the most comfortably modern-sounding and, somewhat expectedly, the most distinctive of the Legends' stylistic forays. That wouldn't count for much, of course, without some top-notch, memorable songs, and Angergârd comes through admirably on that front, even if these aren't quite the blissed-out pop nuggets of Acid House Kings and Club 8. Though it flirts with the sort of all-out indie dance-pop one might anticipate, and despite love-struck lyrics like those of the shimmering opener "Heart" (which, typically enough, lifts its drum programming from "Blue Monday"), this is a curiously conflicted, often emotionally cold album -- palpably the work of an isolated individual rather than a collaborative band. Singles "Play It for Today" and "Lucky Star" are relatively breezy in both content and delivery, but "Closer" and "Another Sunday" mix existential and romantic anxiety in with their pulsating beats and bleeps, while the beatless "Nothing on TV" is about as dreary as the title suggests. At time