Pillars of Influence: Five essentials that inspire Legss
There aren’t many bands in London’s current crop who delve as deep into the surreal and poetic as Legss do on their debut album, Unreal. This has been brewing for some time, with the release of three outstanding yet apocalyptic EPs since the dawn of the ‘20s, but their vision is clearer than ever on this first full-length.
Seemingly emerging from a place of despair and expressing these feelings of confusion and isolation through chaotic post-rock, the four-piece took the long route to their debut offering, but allowing themselves to develop over the course of half a decade has ultimately led to them creating a far more focused body of work than most do when rushed to release an LP while in their infancy.
However, while their caustic and dystopian themes are straight from the post-rock playbook, it’s clear that there is a greater spread of influences on display for the listener to try and establish, and while some of these emerge in their musicality, plenty of it leans closer to the atmospheres that the band are insistent on creating.
It’s all very well being able to create a cataclysmic sound on a record and have it appeal to you on an auditory level, but when you’re able to support it with coherent themes and a sense of consistency in the voice that you’re communicating your ideas with, that’s where acts end up separating themselves from the hollow copycats and establishing themselves as the auteurs of their respective scene.
With satire-drenched salvos courtesy of frontman Ned Green and restless instrumentation that threatens to explode in a fit of fury at any moment, Unreal is a thrilling debut offering that cements Legss as being one of the most astute acts to have emerged from beneath the widening shade of the post-rock umbrella, and it has its broad spectrum of influences to thank for that.
While the band wished to make a special shout-out to the miniature Spanish omelettes that Sainsbury’s have started selling for how they’ve fuelled many a writing session, here is the band’s list of essential cultural fancies and items that they wouldn’t be the same without.
Legss’ five pillars of influence:
‘Mono No Aware’ – Various Artists (2017)
While Unreal is rooted in post-punk, post-rock and abrasive textures, it’s an ambient record that all of the band can collectively agree upon as being their main musical point of reference. They do, of course, acknowledge the importance of other genre-defining records as being integral to their sound, but Mono No Aware, which features contributions from artists as varied as Yves Tumor, Jeff Witscher and James K, is a completely different and mind-altering listening experience when compared to these.
“Our album is such a beautiful mess of genres and worlds and influences and nonsense that it’s hard to suggest just one essential album,” the band explain. “We’ve all, always, loved classics like London Calling and Dummy and Surf’s Up etc, but for the sake of compromise, the compilation album Mono No Aware from ambient label PAN probably offers as much immersion and world-building as you could ever want.”
‘Dead Souls’ – Sam Riviere (2021)
“A mass burial party for London and contemporary poetry and art, and the creative class’s obsession with itself, but done with a cutting that is almost enjoyable, regardless of how much of yourself you see in the hilarious lives and warm structures the novel’s characters have created for themselves.” While the band aren’t referring to their own debut album here, it’s clear that some of the themes that they pick out from Sam Riviere’s debut metafiction, Dead Souls have eked their way into the world of Legss.
“It’s a satire that bridges dystopia and magical realism,” they continue, “And the uncanny is so canny it feels like it’s in the room with you. It is Legss in the sense that it is an art that has eaten itself, inspected its shit for inspiration, and found what it thinks is gold.”
‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’ – Céline Sciamma (2020)
Delving further into important pieces of art from this decade, the band’s main cinematic inspiration is one that they call a “fucking visual and sonic masterpiece.”
While Portrait of a Lady on Fire is still ostensibly a romantic drama, its presentation is unlike anything else found within this genre, and while many consider it to be a modern classic for its intricate subtleties, Legss have taken inspiration from Sciamma’s film for what it doesn’t do rather than what it does.
“It’s so delicate,” they declare. “The simplicity of each shot and the use of silence in sound, and sound in silence, floods your whole body with emotion. The writing is amazing; it’s sexy and melancholic, and who doesn’t love to feel sexy and melancholic? As a sonic landscape, we definitely took a lot of influence from the film, and how it captures a sense of atmosphere and pace in communication/miscommunication. The theme is dark but tender, and I feel that comes across a lot in our songwriting.”
‘Blue Jam’ – Chris Morris (1997-1999)
Considering that Unreal presents itself as a satirically-driven work, it would be amiss for the band to not look towards one of the pillars of modern satire as a source of inspiration. While Chris Morris may be more famed for his provocative mockeries of the media in The Day Today and Brass Eye, and for black comedies such as Four Lions and The Day Shall Come, one of his most daring projects was the short-lived radio sketch show, Blue Jam.
“Blue Jam was definitely one of the gateways into finding our sound when we first started writing together,” the band divulges. “It captured punk in a very comic way, which felt like something we were all trying to do ourselves, and it sort of gave us licence to be more experimental. The way the sketches are soaked in these wet, disorientating, unnatural sound beds, and stitched together with mad samples and Portishead and Stereolab tracks is just otherworldly. It treads that tightrope between the real and the unreal perfectly, exposing the comedic and the extraordinary in the banal and ordinary.”
The Haircomb
While you might consider the previous four entries to all tickle a certain high-brow fancy, the band’s final essential influence is rooted more in our daily lives and necessity than it is about investigating the human psyche – or is it? The haircomb may have existed for many millennia, but it still proves to be an important item that influences how we present ourselves, which the band expressed their appreciation for in a typically poetic fashion.
“We are all essentially vain about not being vain; high maintenance about looking low maintenance; post-rock about being called post-punk; we can find our way home from Sierra Leone but we’re lost without our hairbrushes.”
