In the world of The West Is the Future, everyone's searching for something, and there's nothing to be found. Everyone's headed out West, and what's there for them? "The west is an old lie/the west is a bad man," Darren Jackson sings on the album's opening and closing tracks, the religion-busting "Pilgrim" and the sadder-in-tone, apocalyptic "Atomic Pilgrim," itself a relative of the album's opener "Pilgrim." That first song offers a blessing that amounts to 'good luck on your voyage even though it's bound to end in death and destruction', while the latter song's every note resonates with sadness about the inevitability of pain and emptiness. This is a bleak world, where even the quest for love carries with it the knowledge that all hope is in vain. Kid Dakota's music echoes those lyrical sentiments at every step, through Jackson's rough-but-devoted voice and a hard-edged blues-rock style that tinges both meditative passages and power chords with hurt and sorrow. The West Is the Future is a devastating, draining journey but also a thoroughly riveting one.

-Dave Heaton