It's the second-oldest love story in music: Boy meets drugs. It happened to Darren Jackson and, as in so many other love stories, somebody got screwed. Several years ago, the artist who calls himself Kid Dakota left his hometown of Bison, South Dakota, for East Coast academia, only to fall headlong into heroin addiction; it was then, and during a subsequent relocation to Minnesota—the land of 10,000 lakes and nearly as many rehab clinics—that his elegiac 2000 EP So Pretty came together. Chairkickers Union, a small imprint run by the formative slow-core outfit Low, rereleased the record with additional tracks last year; as a full-length, it garnered local acclaim but remains largely under the radar.

That's a shame. So Pretty is a gorgeously sprawling fever dream laced with some of the most evocative addiction imagery since Elliott Smith's darker days. Jackson, along with musical partner Christopher McGuire and sometime guest (and Low bassist) Zak Sally, double-tracks bleak vocals with woozy guitar and stark, bare-bones percussion—including rattling ice-cube trays—to haunting effect. "Smokestack" peels back an initially idyllic lovers' moment with the pleading, defeated refrain: "I promise to quit / If you promise to stay"; on the title track, he sings softly, "Well, it's dull and it's bent and I can't read the numbers / But nevertheless, it's my friend."

It would all be too unremittingly grim if Jackson didn't have such a sure sense of melody. The affair may be long over, but he's written a memorable good-bye letter.

--Leah Greenblatt