The Legion of Doom

by Stewart Mason
The concept of the mash-up was not an entirely new one in the early 2000s -- for example, the Pet Shop Boys released a puckish 1991 single combining covers of U2's "Where the Streets Have No Name" and Frankie Valli's "Can't Take My Eyes Off of You," and Negativland's pioneering 1980s work in audio collage is one of the primary influences on the mash-up generation -- but the dance community's wholesale adoption of the trick spread the idea into other forms of music. The Beatles' LOVE is a good example, and so is the early work of the Legion of Doom. This Los Angeles duo, comprised of Chad Blinman and Trever Keith, has its roots not in dance music, but punk and emo: Keith is a former member of the '90s emo act Face to Face, and Blinman is an in-demand producer and engineer on the L.A. indie rock scene. In 2001, the duo and three friends (Scott Shiflett of Face to Face, his brother Chris Shiflett of the Foo Fighters, and Josh Freese of A Perfect Circle) formed the guitar-oriented side project supergroup Viva Death, releasing albums in 2002 and 2006. In between those projects, Blinman worked on a new wave-inspired duo project, Real Space Noise, with his childhood friend Steve Ashburn, releasing the punky dance-rock album Radio Method in early 2006 with guest vocals by Keith on some tracks.The Legion of Doom is a third project for the indefatigable pair, one with a tortured creative process that took several years and eventually forced the duo underground. The Legion of Doom's debut album, Incorporated, consists entirely of mash-ups of familiar emo and post-hardcore tracks, expertly stitched together by Keith and Blinman into inventive and entertaining new forms. Recording began on the project in 2004 and was mostly completed by the following year. Unfortunately, the Legion of Doom's attempts to secure proper licenses for their mash-ups after the fact from the representatives of acts like Taking Back Sunday, Coheed & Cambria, the Get Up Kids, Dashboard Confessional, and My Chemical Romance, to name but a few of the sampled, proved fruitless. Rather than abandon the legally dubious but musically compelling album altogether, Keith and Blinman took the route Danger Mouse chose for his equally dodgy The Grey Album: Incorporated was leaked onto the Internet via MP3 blogs and P2P trading networks in early 2006, and was now available online with only a little digging. More financially remunerative are the Legion of Doom's playful remixes for acts like Hawthorne Heights and their contributions to various film and television soundtracks, including the horror sequel Saw II. In March 2007, the 14-song Incorporated was finally offered on CD (with excellent cover art by Derek Hess) for an initial limited run of 3,000 copies through the Illegal Art website.