DAKOTA SUITE - Waiting For The Dawn To Crawl Through And Take Away Your Life

Sorry for the delay. That's what English singer-songwriter Chris Hooson, who along with Danny Buxton fronts the project Dakota Suite, might say for the four-year wait for the follow-up to the previous album "This River Only Brings Poison". And it's also what anyone owes to say who, only today and months late, is finally getting around to talking about this work, whose title is as long-winded as it is emblematic, released in the first half of the year and having gone almost completely unnoticed by critics. After all, Hooson's compositional nature seems tailor-made to stay hidden in the shadows, yet ready to unveil its small universe of emotions, whispered quietly, to those with the patience to look past the merely formal simplicity of a stark, understated music, and let themselves be enveloped by the gentle embrace of a melancholy so deeply ingrained in its author's sensibility that it becomes almost a sweet object of contemplation.

“There’s never much to say between / the moments of our dreams and what we’ll do / and you’re afraid of everything / that could set you free”: with these telling words opens a work entirely focused on themes of abandonment, the dissolving of dreams and hopes, and the resulting, almost placid acceptance that a fully realized happiness is simply unattainable.

Without indulging in self-pity, Hooson lays bare, with delicacy and deep humanity, the fears of living and loving ("Because Our Lie Breathes Differently", "I'm Leaving You"), the fallacy of promises that not even willpower is able to keep ("A Darkness Of Moons"), and a disillusionment so deeply rooted in the soul's solitude that it cannot be eased even by feelings, which are at once to be welcomed and rejected ("Because Our Lie Breathes Differently", "Over A Loveless Winter"). And yet, in partial contradiction to the constant poetics of fragile sorrow that pervades the whole record, by the end there still flickers the mirage of something solid to hold on to ("All That I Can Hold Near"), something to cling to and build a life around, even though that life "is about losing everything".

So much for the emotions. And the music? Naturally, the music too is perfectly suited to the mood of the lyrics, being built around essential compositions for acoustic guitar and piano, yet rounded out by rich arrangements that draw on a wide array of instruments (from cello to electric guitars, all the way to synth), creating a body of refined, understated orchestration that forms the perfect backdrop to Hooson's smooth vocals, soft and almost resigned to their own quiet suffering. The instrumental variety is further rounded out by recurring horns and by rhythms that are always discreet and nuanced, which on several occasions lend an almost jazzy quality to the enchanting clarity of acoustic textures and piano parts of disarming simplicity and effectiveness.

In Hooson's melancholy, however, there is room not only for a serene, disenchanted emotional and musical understatement, but also for darker, more sinister passages, albeit marked by the same expressive restraint that underpins the whole record. That's the case with the muted electric edges of "All Your Hopes Gone Cold" and, above all, with the instrumentals "Uw Wanhopige Vrees" and "Early Century Maple", with their string loops, murky and solemn at once.

Beyond these only partial exceptions, everything here is light and faint, as well as perfectly realized, as happens only when a work is deeply felt and a genuine expression of a fragile, intense human and artistic sensibility that nonetheless possesses a calm inner balance. Chris Hooson, after all, is certainly no kid, and his maturity shows through in the intimate refinement of a singer-songwriter craft whose only real point of comparison might be the aching slowness of the most introverted Mark Kozelek, and in the delicacy of hushed compositions of poignant, refined nostalgia.

As the documentary film "Wintersong" also shows - included in the Dvd that comes with the limited edition of the album - for Hooson, artistic creation springs from a simple, quiet normality, light years away from any superstructure foreign to inspiration and to the urge to put into music his own feelings and his own inconsolable view of the world. Such inspiration tolerates no haste; so it should come as no surprise that four years of silence preceded this gem of an album, as intense and heartfelt as few others, seemingly ordinary but brimming with overflowing humanity - perhaps not able to strike everyone, but bound to take firm root in the hearts of those willing to surrender to its emotions, even at the risk of being, gently, wounded by them.

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19/11/2007