Lola's Dead

It all started in Pistoia (Tuscany – Italy) in the middle of the 90s. Alberto sang the punk-rock wearing a bass guitar abundantly under his belt (O.O.P. – Pandora’s Box), Lorenzo Cappelli played Deep Purple in bell-bottom jeans (Dark Light) while Edoardo Farnioli and Tommaso Cantini began their noise-oriented sound research, with the enigmatic Das Gasthaus.
Lola’s Dead project is rooted far back in 2002, when Alberto (lead vocals) joined Edoardo (bass guitar), Tommaso (drums) and Daniel Autobahn (guitar) to form a band called Die fesche Lola (a German song from early 30’s made famous by Marlene Dietrich). The result of this union was a self-produced demo, Anteprima (2004), a three parts resume of the work made in the previous two years. The recording alternates between well-framed and easy moments. In the same year Lorenzo (guitar), driven by his passion for musical experimentation, joined the project and after few months of “cohabitation” became the main guitar of the band as Daniel moved to Berlin.
Die fesche Lola didn’t stop, they rather went on writing new songs in studio and playing live.
Between 2006 and 2007 the self-produced EP Lontano… e oltre was concluded. The band itself defined the work as kind of a greatest hits. The EP, (a selection of original songs written in the last years and a cover of the classic That’s life revisited “the Lola’s way”), was very heterogeneous and showed how times were changing; the most recent songs in particular seemed to be the last steps before a turning point. Rather than “turning point” it’s probably more correct to speak about “natural evolution”, that brings Die fesche Lola closer to typical post-rock sounds and composition styles. Anyway the choice of the band remained not to conform to any established genre. The last chapter of Die fesche Lola’s story was a 10 minutes song recorded in early 2009: Astronauta, just about enough to realise that Lola had gone. Lola was dead. But not the band.
2009 was almost entirely spent writing new material. A full immersion. Few gigs, no way to find an official name and some fights, but the only important thing was the quest for sounds, tempos and melodies. Day by day the incisive rhythm section created by Tommaso and Edoardo melted together with the melodies composed by Lorenzo.
The result was about 20 minutes of music, two new pieces, ideal preamble and coda for Astronauta. Listening to the work, it seems to be a single long suite, a path from an A to a B point with no time to turn around. It’s an orgy of delays and overdrives, marked by rhythms sometimes obsessive, other times undetectable. In March 2010 Alberto started to arrange vocal parts and writing lyrics (for the first time in English, as the band decided). Words seemed to come out from the music itself, the story of “someone, from amnion to the view of his own grave”. The story of an existence through the three phases of life (youth, adulthood and old age), dissected in the three songs that composed the work. A concept.
In Winter 2010 recording and post-production (self made at Zitronenhaus Studios, band’s general headquarters), were concluded. In those days Lorenzo offered the band his skills as graphic designer creating the EP artwork .
On March 12th 2011 Those Who Read Between the Lines was released, every single detail of the work has been made by the band. For this occasion the band has also made official his new name: Lola’s Dead and the new web site (lolasdead.com).
Well, “Lola’s Dead. But we’re not. For now.”, says one of their slogans, full of a kind of fatalism and undeterminedness that seem to be the real leading thread able to guide us through their career and their music. Lola’s Dead is the reaching of an awareness built through long and controversial phases of composition and listening, but probably never definitive.

ILC