It’s become rare to stumble across a band who effortlessly blast away the cynicism. Lola Colt are one of those preciously innovative exceptions and after witnessing them live last year, October’s released album `Away From the Water’ only cemented the conclusion that this band stand head and shoulders above some of the rest.
Like some moody,western hybrid of the Gun Club, with touches of PJ Harvey and Jefferson Airplane, the debut album by this London sextet rolls wall-eyed and black-lipped over the horizon. Singer Gun Overbye has a dagger in her voice, albeit one wrapped in a velvet sheath, plus a movie show of stylish noir violence constantly playing in her head. And with a gang of five behind her to bring that film to life, Lola Colt’s relatively well-populated line-up means they’re never short of instrumentation or colour, even if that colour is always black, with slashes of red.
Lola Colt may have spent hours practising their moves in front of a mirror, but then they surely smashed that mirror to a hundred pieces, and this album is that fractured, multi-faceted reflection. Defiantly dark but cruelly seductive, the chemtrail guitars and tribal drums with psychedelic in the purely narcotic sense, desert peyote trips and, with haunted organ emerging from tangled barbed wire feedback at the song’s coda, ‘Heartbreaker’ suggests the drive and pulse of the Black Angels, except that, while you sense the Austin band are too cool, or too stoned, to get worked up about much of anything, Lola Colt have a better understanding of dynamics and emotional expression, and sound genuinely agitated as a result. The release of “Heartbreaker” surely designed to dominate the airwaves of the more discerning radio stations. Starting up on some Cramps-style down-and-dirty guitar chords, Gun’s sonorous voice smoothly rides psyche-inspired layers of sound that swell and build, ebb and flow, even wandering through a momentary Doors-inspired tribute courtesy of Kitty’s deft keyboards, before building a brooding, hypnotic tension again.
The Fat Angel Sings 