The La's
The La's

THE REVIEW

"Lee Mavers is the best songwriter of his generation"

These are the words of Noel Gallagher from Oasis who, for once in his life, humbly pays tribute to the leader of the La's.

This quote alone would be enough as a review of the album because if the unpleasant and arrogant Noel pays homage in such a way to someone who does the same job and genre as him, then the album in question must undoubtedly be a great record. 

And it is.

Let's take the whole Brit-Pop genre and try to give it some coordinates: then we could say that its explosion can be identified from '94 - '96, that is when bands like Oasis, Stone Roses, Blur, and then Supergrass and many others, had their debuts or their main successes.
Most of you will know this story.

But the reality is that in 1990 a Liverpool quartet released only one album in their very short career, which, it seems, wasn't even supposed to come out because the tracks didn't satisfy the leader Mavers.
Years before Brit-Pop itself, then.
But let's talk a bit about these twelve tracks: pure 100% Brit-Pop from the first to the last track (all above average) which are, in their own way, small gems, and which closely recall bands like Kinks, Who, Beatles and all the best of English beat music: notably "I Can't Sleep" reminiscent of early Who, the beautiful "Son Of A Gun" which slightly recalls "La Bamba" in the line "better run, rabbit run, run into the sun", "There She Goes" perfect melody that would make bands like Oasis and Blur envious.
But the highest point is that "Timeless Melody" perfectly described in the title itself: a timeless melody, with a dense layer of guitars that support it making it sweetly sad and melancholic, making it above all unique in its genre.

Now, having said that, it would be almost predictable to talk about plagiarism by various mid-90' English bands towards this album.

But why should we have these thoughts and ruin these twelve simple moments of pure English music?
The Oasis may have drawn a lot from the La's (musically and aesthetically, see Lee's haircut), but the La's in turn make music that harks back to mid-60s Beat, which, in turn, harked back to Elvis's Rock 'n' Roll, and so on.

This is not plagiarism. This is the history of rock.

It is a huge book in continuous writing from which one always draws from the previous chapter and, when it is worth it, one puts a nice bookmark in the favorite chapter, the one where there resides a particular, timeless melody, able "to break the chains of thoughts".