Back in 1987 me and my fiancé used to sneak everyday with McDonald’s happy meals to Andy Warhol’s factory and sat outside the big sliding metal door waiting for the music to play. You see Andy had a secret unnamed music label where he’d find the town’s finest bands kept secret, sign them up, make them record the best albums of their career and then wait for the labels to start bidding, sort of like the black market for artists. I recall Tiga being one of his interns at the factory at that time, although Warhol never adopted him because some how he knew that he’d someday compare a super band to sausages. It was only a few days since we started hanging outside his lair, everyday noon-ish the same album would start playing and the most acceptably skull piercing noise penetrated our eardrums and brain, we couldn’t really come up with an explanation for those industrial shrills but it didn’t matter because we loved every bit of it like an awkward fetish.
Little we knew that the intercom had a hidden webcam connected to Warhol’s Macbook, turns out he knew about us all along but decided to treat us as his lab rats by exposing us to music in return for unrehearsed reactions! Realizing we had found out about the cam the door sled and some dude calling himself Panda Bear asked us in, then sat in a corner doing Amphetamine with a couple other dudes who looked intense. Andy was reading Hipster Runoff on his Macbook and a geeky dude stared at us from the uncomfortable inflatable sofa (it came free with Smash Hits), had a tag on his E.R.O.L. t-shirt saying “I’m a Journalist”, pointing at Panda Bear and his friends he said “they call themselves the Animal Collective” then rolled his eyes.
That amazing album was playing loud, there was hentai on the 51” LCD TV and some crystal glasses next to a bottle of purified piss-colored cologne and a pyramid of speakers against a blue brick wall… this time though the music was much more intense and the noises covering the beautiful songs came in waves of almost unbearable decibels. It appears the band recorded the album using broken amplifiers, a multitude of guitar pedals, vintage synthesizers and organs that Warhol messed with prior to the recording session in need for a flawed malfunction-generated sound, an experiment resulting in something aesthetically beautiful and damaged.
Next to an R2D2 phone on the coffee table, laid a pack of black cherry cigarettes, an ashtray full of purple candy wraps and the album cover, it had the name THE LEGENDS across and looked like what Ethan Kath’s album cover would look like if he had fine hair and made 8-bitless Indie rock music without Alice having to scream or be the center of attention. Thirty minutes felt like five, the last track was almost over and everyone started stretching and getting their coats on before heading out, apparently lady GaGa was DJing at club Durrr that night. We all got into the elevator, stood in awkward silence all the way down and right before the doors opened, the journalist turned to us and said “If My Bloody Valentine swallowed Peter, Bjorn and John, it might sound something like this.” – we thought, AMEN.
As much as we wanted to see it on Hypem’s Popular charts, the unfortunate death of Warhol that month threw the record into the depth of the unlicensed treasures and kept it captive in vaults until this year. The Legend’s new album Over & Over is in my top 5 albums of 2009 so far and now I have developed eardrums that appreciate the combination of sharp damaged home appliances noises with good echoed indie music.
01. You Won
02. Seconds Away
03. Always The Same
04. Monday To Saturday
05. Heartbeats
06. Dancefloor
07. Turn Away
08. Recife
09. Over And Overrack
10. Jump
11. Something Strange Will Happen
12. Touch
By all means, you must hear this album, your musical intellect depends on it.
