Lola Colt – “Driving Mr Johnny”

If you spent the better part of your youth being shunted from one rural Florida town to the next, you’d wear all-black, smoke clove cigarettes, and dream of rainy days in London Town, too. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction, and for sensitive North Florida teens battered by the sun and “art fag” slurs hurled from passing pick-up trucks in the early 1990s, that reaction came in the form of The Jesus and Mary Chain, The Smiths, and the divine Ms. Siouxsie Sioux.

As much shit-upon teens from nowhere dreaming of a somewhere, my friends and I sought refuge in the cinematic psychedelia of bands that spoke with British accents and dressed with a modicum of class. They had principles and imaginations and spoke to a world larger than the after-school shift at Quincy’s Family Steakhouse.

Lola Colt, named after the whacked-out Spaghetti Western of the same name, reminds me of this time. Based in London, they capture a kind of dark drama and escapism that doesn’t sound terribly contemporary, but is more interested in timelessness anyway. Lead guitarist Matt Loft, who shares songwriting duties with the awesomely-named vocalist Gun Overbye, described their songs as being “soundtracks to as-yet-unmade movies.”

And, they’re movies I would want to see—part Spaghetti Western, sure, but I hear just as much European spy drama, country-dotting Le Carré with some Mata Hari, femme fatale action in the mix.

Fuzz Club Records will release the band’s debut album Away From The Water on October 27. In the meantime, there’s plenty of online intrigue to be had, including the album’s first single “Driving Mr Johnny.”