Dakota Suite Waiting For The Dawn To Crawl Through And Take Away Your Life by: Tom Bradbury Mon:07-May-07 Label: Glitterhouse Year: 2007 WB rating 59 out of 100

“This song is a very cheery song, about a boy that received a small package of joy. When he opened it up it made him happy. Actually, it’s not about anything to do with that, its called: ‘I Can Feel Your Disease’.” This quote, from the companion DVD (Wintersong) to Dakota Suite’s new album, Waiting For The Dawn To Crawl Through And Take Away Your Life, perfectly encapsulates the group’s incredibly bleak world view. Dakota Suite’s music varies from gently soothing to oppressively morbid, but for the most part it is simply depressing.

Songwriter Chris Hooson sings his aggressively introspective lyrics over sparsely picked guitar chords and mournful piano. These songs are withered husks of despair, and as the title to the companion DVD Wintersong would suggest, they are vehemently anti-summer. The only thing missing is the sound of raindrops crashing into the ground, or of a cold wind eating into your skin. It is music that expunges happiness. If you are in a good mood or feel even remotely joyful, then I implore you to not listen to Waiting For The Dawn To Crawl Through And Take Away Your Life, because it will absolutely destroy those feelings. On the other hand, if you are looking to kill yourself but haven’t yet been able to put that final nail in the coffin, then this might be just the album you’re looking for.

When I listen to this album, I feel like asking, ‘can it really be that bad?’ Waiting For The Dawn To Crawl Through And Take Away Your Life is full of track names like ‘All Your Hopes Gone Cold’, ‘I’m Leaving You’, ‘Over a Loveless Winter’ and ‘Brittle With Sorrow’. It’s a bit much, really. It’s like there is an enforced sadness to Dakota Suite’s work, as if Hooson’s alienation were some sort of addictive drug; in effect he is a chattel of his own despair. It’s a pity, because Hooson has a gift for melody and ambience, buts it bogged down by the sheer blackness of the material. The best tracks on this album are the ones that contain just a hint of sunshine, which allows at least a small escape from the claustrophobic despair of the album. ‘Never Much To Say’ features Hooson’s soft tenor over reverb coated pedal steel, and is comforting rather than crushing in its melancholy. On ‘A Darkness Of Moons’ his voice intermingles with the backing vocalist as if they were meant for each other, almost as like they were vocal soul mates – the tunes tenderness is not buried by layers of morbid production.

The dark nature of Dakota Suite’s music may have something to do with the fact that Hooson claims he can only write songs when something bad has happened to him. For him, music serves a purely cathartic purpose. Yet in music, there is a vast difference between poignancy and an inescapable black hole of sadness. You can write sad songs that have an element of joy to them, or some sort of uplifting or transcendent property.  Hooson either does not understand this or chooses to shirk it. On ‘Brittle With Sorrow’, lone notes on the piano echoing the very essence of alienation, as far apart from one another as the subject from his society. ‘Brittle’ is a telling word – this is music so rigid that one soft touch could shatter it and its creator.

Hooson is talented, but he has let himself become enshrouded in darkness. If he could break free of his melancholic shackles and write music based on joy or the hope for future happiness, or at least find a way to turn his despair into positive energy, rather than simply bleeding onto the tape – it would be a lot more constructive for him and for everyone else.