KID DAKOTA
The West is the Future (Chair-Kickers Music)
Reviewed by Holly Day

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This is an album about someone trying to figure out how things are, or how they work, or something like that. There's meditations on windmills and nature, the futility of trying to make things happen, where God is, etc., etc. Without trying to speculate on the type of person who made the album, these are exactly the types of deep ruminations my "bad" friends and I used to spend hours going around and around with after ingesting random non-food items from the party bowl my best friend used to assemble from her mother's medicine cabinet (yes, I did grow up in the '80s, thank you!). There's a lot of "I" questions/narrative-placement here that feed into that theory, too, like the "I" prevalent in early Velvet Underground music, the "I" in Iggy Pop's early catalog, and even the "I" in Sisters of Mercy's and Bauhaus' prime period material. The music itself isn't anything like any of the above - it's quiet, menacing, strangely folky at times, with lots of staticky guitar and this underlying current of tension that holds these songs together like a bolt of piano wire.

© 2005 - Holly Day