The La's and the quest for perfection

Case in point of the kind of album review I hate:

Pitchfork Review of The La's, BBC in Session

Personally, I couldn't disagree more with Mr. Tangari's opinion of The La's (I'm not going to even attempt to figure out what the possessive form of The La's is-- it's probably real ugly) lone studio album. And I'm not going to debate that these recordings from the BBC could very well be stronger in some sense.

But what I really bristle at is this: "It's hard to believe that the band on the last session is the same one that recorded The La's, mostly due to the fact that they sound so inspired, and it's weird that they couldn't duplicate the feel of the session in a different studio. It seems they may have simply put too much pressure on themselves recording the album to get what they really wanted."

There's absolutely no context given for this statement. While Lee Mavers' notorious perfectionism is alluded to early in the review, there's no delving into what that meant for him personally. No thought as to investigating the whole divide between what an artist hears in his or her head and what they hear when they listen back to their record. No hint of the frustration that can come with that, or how interesting Mavers' pursuit of an elusive sound was. Just the reviewer's assumption that he knows what Mavers is looking for and by golly here it is-- how could he not have seen it?

I remember reading a fantastic article in Mojo back a couple of years ago around the time when The La's was re-issued and it did what I like for music writing to do: it taught me how to love an album. It contextualized it and put Mavers' particularly stunted brand of genius into perspective. Since that time, I've been a huge La's fan, and I'll certainly be getting this new disc. But rather than introduce to you the glory of an underrated band and their entire tangled history in pop music, their struggle to grasp the holy grail of pop as defined by a very personal vision, Tangari has opted to tell you that if you have to pick between the two La's releases, get this one. Lame.