LA WEEKLY Best of 1999
Radio Falling James' Top 15

1. Public Enemy, There's a Poison Goin On (Atomic Pop).  Creepy millenial imprecations.  "The reverse of jiggy."
2. The Dagons, The Other Ending (Dead Sea Captain). Jangly fever dreams, and a lyrical cross between the Brothers Grimm and Sylvia Plath.

PITCHWEEKLY Best of 1999
Andrew Miller's Top Ten

5.  THE DAGONS The Other Ending (Dead Sea Captain)
The Dagons concoct a disturbing blend of dark surf guitar riffs, pounding percussion and disarmingly heavenly vocals that bring to mind Portishead's Beth Gibbons, all while maintaining an underlying sense of pop melodicism and working within three-minute windows. The Other Ending, like a fine horror film or a classic murder ballad, manages to be truly haunting yet captivating, inescapable and unforgettable.

LA WEEKLY
The Dagons, Devics at Spaceland.

Karie Jacobson's obsessive love songs are like modern-day Grimm's fairy-tales, juxtaposing beauty and brutality on equal doses on the Dagons' CD The Other Ending. "I'm a hag with iron teeth," she declares in "Bulgarian Wolf," closing with a baleful warning: "I will fly in through your chimney, stinking of formaldehyde-now dream this!" When Jacobson is not in love with love, she often gets dreamy about dreaming: "Tuck your head under your wing and/ sleep like a low-lying fog." On "Sugarine", the sweetness turns poisonous: "Fall in love with your rapist, marry the man/if he can't protect you, sugar, who can?" Her contrary declarations are backed by fellow San Franciscans Ronnie Sargent, bass, and Drew Kowalski, drums, who segue from jangly pop to stormier moods, creating soundtracks to late-night evacuations, which make the Dagons a simpatico match for the torchy reveries of L.A.'s Devics. (Falling James)

LISTEN.COM
(review of the song "Bulgarian Wolf," from The Dagons The Other Ending):
If you could strip Rockabilly of all its gear-- being sure to wash away any trace of grease from its pompadour-- and dress it up in something a little darker, you'd end up with the Dagons.  Reverb-slathered guitars hum a grim sound, and Karie Jacobson's vocals approach a snarl at all the right moments.  Sexy and slightly macabre at the same time. (Kali H.)

ANGRY THOREAUAN
The Dagons
The Other Ending CD

This latest effort starts off rather slowly, the first cut being far from the strongest one offered.  But this band does not wait long to kick long to kick into garage-gear; the second song, "Breathstealer," is a hot one, its dark mood and desperate vocal style making it even more macabre.  Then there are selections that are cowpunk (but not country crap), restrained hellbilly and sometimes flat out creepy rock'n'roll reminiscent of dark desert nights.

MELODY MAKER (UK)

If the Cardigans were to allow themselves to be affected by heroin or another opiate, they might sound like the Dagons.  Hailing from San Francisco and mostly female, The Dagons have songs with titles like  "Changeling" and "Breathstealer" and the vocalist possesses a voice with the sweetness of Nina Persson and the intonation of Courtney Love. Musically they like to experiment with everything from sinister waltzes to Middle Eastern laments.  I should imagine they would be quite popular with slightly left-of-centre San Francisco audiences: they're the kind of band that would pop up in some seedy club in a film, as the sultry soundtrack to various shady dealings.

OUT OF FOCUS (Sweden)

Simple, sometimes fast (in rock terms that is), intense rock that is sometimes dangerously close to the epithet "pop," that just plainly reigns supreme!   In the middle of the record the material goes down a grade (from 100% great to 99% great, if you get the point.)  But the band gets back on the right track with "Sugarine," and especially "Bulgarian Wolf."  The fact is that the Dagons are one of the reasons I survived my horrible summer!  Discover before the hype is at its utmost peak-- order cds from the lovely little D.I.Y. label Dead Sea Captain!
WIDE EYED (Seattle)
review of the 7 inch "You Kill the Dream"

... this is a great record.  Singer Karie Jacobson has a clear voice like Barbara Manning's without the growl, or PJ Harvey's creepy mid-range.  She opens the first song, "You Kill the Dream, by drawing a shiver-inducing breath.  From there the songs dive into the three a.m. haunt that keeps you desperate and awake.  The Dagons pay attention to detail: Jacobson alternately cuts off lines before they're done or pushes her lungs beyond the air inside them, the guitars and drums are clean and low in the mix, the melodies are strong.  Punk rock should sound more like the Dagons.  (Chris)
SunserSunset Strip RadioSSsiSunset Strip Radi 

REVIEWS OF LIVE SHOWS

LA WEEKLY 
"Under the Sea" with The Dagons, Aye Aye Cap'n,
Dick Army, The Kraken at Spaceland

You might say that Dagons singer-guitarist Karie Jacobson and
drummer Drew Kowalski are kind of obsessed about life underwater,
although the duo's perspective is a bit darker than, say, Disney's The Little Mermaid. Their small label is called Dead Sea Captain Records,
and the Dagons' second CD of vaguely gothic, feverish fairy-tale jangle, Make Us Old, contains poetic imagery like "when you lay down/you lost oceans of time," from the languidly beautiful "Sleep in Perfume." In "Las Sirenas," Jacobson warns about sirens luring sailors into shipwrecks, but she could also be describing the eerie power of her own music: "Just like water in your lungs . . . the song swells up/throbs in your nails/and trembles planks/and your dull eyes fail." For tonight's special "Under the Sea"-themed bill, the Dagons are joined by the Kraken, Dick Army and the appropriately named Aye Aye Cap'n. (Falling James)

LA WEEKLY 
(Project K, The Dagons at Al's Bar)

Here are two of L.A.'s most interesting and lyrically intelligent new bands, both finding non-retro ways to solve the future-of-rock dilemma. On their second CD, Make Us Old (Dead Sea Captain), the Dagons indulge in moody, poetic fairy-tale lamentations like "Poison Comb" and "If You Kiss Me," a jangly country-goth confession. Even better are their new chansons, with drummer Drew Kowalski's incantational cymbal slashings and singer Karie Jacobson's plaintive, possessed melodies circling reproachfully in the air like word wreaths, or wraiths. 

LA WEEKLY 
... the strange bill included the ghostly pop of THE DAGONS and the intelligent alterna-garage of new bong load signing Project K... 

LIVE MAGAZINE (Los Angeles)
The Dagons at Spaceland

This experimental, dreamy collaboration of artistic beauty drew all of my attention with their uncanny ability to hypnotize.  Karie Jacobson, the lead vocalist, entranced me, as well as the rest of the audience, with her fairy tale, angelic voice and intelligently structured vocal melodies. This band works well together...like two molecules that fused together because of extreme heat and speed. They complimented each other like fools in love. I hate comparing musical acts to other, more famous acts, but sometimes you have to because words aren't enough. I think the Dagons are a bit like PJ Harvey or The Cardigans on an Opium induced ride through twinkling night skies. In a nut shell, they were detail-oriented, yet still intriguing. Clean, yet sinister. Punk with a stormy depth. They have a shot at being big if they want to be. I see their music being used in sci-fi movies, if not on underground radio stations. These San Franciscans throw hints from all different influences into their music. They are thought provoking, mind altering and cool to look at. The Dagons won my respect. I would see them again if I knew they were going to be in town. You should too! They get an A+. (Marco Polo)

When last we checked in on Dagons singer-guitarist Karie Jacobson and drummer Drew Kowalski, the exiled-to-LA-from-Frisco duo had just released an enchanting second collection of twisted fairy tales and mournful keening, Make Us Old, on their own Dead Sea Captain label.  They also ditched their last in a long line of bass players, realizing that the bass interfered with the increasingly delicate interplay between Jacobson's folksy, doomy jangle and Kowalski's contrastingly heavy, chain-rattling drums.  Former fans accused the pair of turning into a gender reversal of the White Stripes- a shallow comparison, since the Dagons' stormy passages, spiked with Jacobson's mordantly Sylvia Plath-like imagery, don't sound anything like Jack White's more clearly retro roots rock.  "Las Sirenas," "Poison Comb" and "Sleep in Perfume" are languorous, baleful, half-lidded fever dreams: goth without the vampire costumes, country without the twang, punk without the artifice, seasick without the ocean.  (Falling James)  

SunsetStripRadio.com
The Dagons: A chronical of myth, men and music

 Rock music is that proverbial onion with a million skins. Unlike the artichoke, it hasn't a heart. No matter how many layers are pulled back, the next will taste indistinctly the same. Yet the payoff is in the shedding of each skin, stripping it down to complete nakedness at the evocation of a few tears. Inward -- and further inward -- we go, towards obliteration. Where most bands fail is in their adhesion to the first skin, the surface skin. It is the first to dry and yellow and too, in essence, die.
Such a death will not befall the Dagons, an adroit Los Angeles garage act that has peeled back their own regenerative skins to reveal that admirable nothingness that rock music aspires to. They are, figuratively, naked.

 The Dagons are a clear gray December day in St. Petersburg, with a sun, small as a flickering bead in a dead sky, radiating zero heat. The very idea of warmth is enough Then again, they are oceanic, a slow, downward-spiraling dream in aquatic space. How relaxing the seabed below, and the ability to give up, to plunge weightlessly towards it. Of those fibers that make up reverie and rootless fantasia, so are the Dagons made.Sharing an emotive kinship to the Devics, (a band of former-Angelenos now residing in Italy), the Dagons are poetry, melody and maelstrom, bound in a lawless duo of Karie Jacobson and Drew Kowalski. The former is the singer/bassist/guitarist, the latter a drummer. Their brand of garage rock (if one can attribute such a crass term to the blackened fairy tales that is their music) is as moving as it is toxic. Much the same as their central theme, Love -- as in Edna St. Vincent Millay's kind of Love, subversive cutting both directions with equal amounts of vulnerability and fortitude. 

 The White Stripes they are not. The Mates of State they are not. They are themselves.
Here's the whole scrub on the Dagons: Ms. Jacobson's vox are dire while still maudlin, what you'd imagine Sylvia Plath's voice sounding like if she were reading Winter Trees to you through a sturdy PA. Each way the mistral blows, the Dagons are passenger to he current. Every dreary dreamscape they create in song just as easily flees into aggressive punk rock matter, a yearn here, a revolt there. Drum and bass deposits, static, distortion, infirm buzzing from the amps, all collective and full even without an army of rhythm players backing it. The tension builds up but, unlike standard punk rock bands, Jacobson resists the typical yowl-spit-crawl demonstrations to hit a climax. Her release simply simmers on a low yellow flame, and eventually becomes helium in the atmosphere. On their album "Make Us Old" (Dead Sea Captain Records), a 10-song album that drastically mood swings from soft chansons to prickly up-tempo numbers to masterful prose delivered in a ghostly manner, the Dagons show off a peculiar lyrical genius, lyrical and powerfully astute. In "He Went Into Space," the whiteness of feeling is tempered by what's actually being said: "The eye's not satisfied with seeing/The ear wants better noise/He dreamed/Of putting rifles to his head/And lighting up the sky."Suicide as an art form? Yes, but beautiful in the same way everything is beautiful, as a purple bruise, as the Aurora Borealis, as a warhead, etc. Others are more radical, more poignant, less eyeful. "Poison Comb" is a rub-off/mutation of a Disney classic;title-track "Make Us Old" is a poem of ageism, time, mortality; "Sleep in Perfume"brings to mind Rene Magritte's discursiveness in painting, and so on.
The Dagons play at Bigfoot Lodge and Spaceland frequently.
 Reference:
 http://www.dagons.net
 (CMindenhall@earthlink.net )`
 

WAKEZINE 
The Dagons have a unique sound one doesn t typically 
come across. Their lyrics are unusual and refreshing to hear 
in these modern times, in the sense that they re not singing 
about sweaters and Cadillac s. The style of music
 executed on this record is quite nice. Imagine you re 
being transported to a time where distortion pedals and
 feedback are commonplace, drums are typically softer, 
and cymbals are next to godliness. You still manage to 
hear the vocals in the music you re listening to. Strange, 
you ve somehow managed to track yourself back into the
 early to mid-late 1960 s. This honestly brings me back to 
the time of The Rolling Stones, and the likes of "Paint
 it Black." Mix that with the ghost of an organ grinder, 
his monkey, and a few creepy spirits, notably those of
 dead feminist poets, and a few writers of fairytales...This 
is the distinct feeling you will perhaps get from The 
Dagon s record Make Us Old, on Dead Sea Captain 
Records. This is their sophomore release, and an 
independent one at that. I must say it s excellent.

Regrettably I ve not seen them perform live as of yet, 
but they are playing a show September 3rd. See their
 website, http://www.dagons.net, for more information. 
This record feels live, and has a passion to it, a reckless
 and wild energy. The lyrics haunt and grind away at 
your mind and soul while you re seduced by the eerie 
and yet strangely siren-like, piercing voice of Karie 
Jacobson. She not only sings these amazing, almost 
addicting melodic tunes, but she plays guitar as well,
something most female vocalists don t do anymore.

 "You smoked in bed and never woke again &take me 
with you &Take me with you &Your first attack was 
terrible to see, your eyes rolled back and forgot everything &" 
This is just a taste of the lyrics that tear away at your soul
 and pester your mind. This is one of those records where 
the songs truly create stories of their own and keep you
 coming back for more. The instrumentals are only there 
to set the mood of the stories conveyed in these magnificent 
lyrical deviations from normalcy. I believe The Dagons are 
trying to show us they don t simply play instruments; they 
tell stories of pain, and loss, of deception, torment and anguish, 
mainly through the chillingly beautiful voice of Jacobson. As
this record captivated me, it will surely draw and seduce you 
into its web of complex feelings and messages. Definitely give 
this one a listen. They certainly deserve it. (Omar Amer) )
 

REVIEWS OF MAKE US OLD
 

ICE MAGAZINE
Espousing a stripped-down psychedelia/garage aesthetic and lyrics that seem to suck the marrow out of odd nightmares, the band is offering the witchy wah-wah tunes "Poison Comb," "If You Kiss Me," "He Went Into Space" and "Sleep In Perfume." All tracks are from the new disc, which the band is selling through their web site at dagons.net
(Mark Lewis)

ANGRY THOREAUAN
The Dagons
Make Us Old
CD
Please be aware that this is not a typo and that is not THE DRAGONS about which I am talking (the one with the "R" hailing from San Diego), as THE DAGONS recently moved from San Francisco to Los Angeles and THE DRAGONS often play Los Angeles. Anyhow, THE DAGONS are decidedly different from THE DRAGONS, the latter playing rip-roaring, hook-laden rock'n'roll,whereas the former band injects into one's psyche dark songs of frightful intent. The desperate lyrics and singing style work well with the only slightly restrained riffs, riffs that mean to sink teeth into one's soul, once said soul is drawn in by 
the singer's siren-esque voice. And then there are the western-flavoured cuts that ring with a subtle horror, and the mood is shattered like an empty shot glass dropped by a loud-mouthed drunk whose last meal was hot lead just delivered. (Rev. Randall Tin-Ear)

RAZORCAKE
Dagons, The 
Make Us Old" cd
This San Francisco band transplanted itself to LA in the fall of 2000, hot off the heels of recording their second full length.  SF's loss is definitely LA's gain.  The Dagons mine literary references, gothic imagery and Grimm's Fairy Tales all the while avoiding the trappings of goth in favor of a straight-up rock approach.  Singer Karie Jacobson (who also played bass on this album) lulls you with sweet, ethereal vocals as drummer Drew Kowalski sneaks up with menacing, pounding drum work on songs like "Grinder" and "As Close As You May Ever Get."  Spooky in a good way.  --Bob 

GLUE MAGAZINE
This is the sophomore release by these SF-to-LA transplants. One of the more literate rock bands, The Dagons take their name from the Philistine god of debauchery, and the title of this CD is snatched from a line by turn-of-the century poet Sarah Teasdale. Make Us Old  is a moody and eclectic album filled with gothic imagery and catchy melodies. Singer/guitarist Karie Jacobson sings in a voice reminiscent of Babes In Toyland's Kat Bjelland but she never resorts to abrasive screaming to get her point across. The uplifting guitar melody on "He Went Into Space," evoking the kitschy '40s samba "Brazil," successfully contrasts against the lyrics "He dreamed of putting rifles to his head/ and lighting up the sky." (Bob Cantu)

OUTBURN 
Dark rock from Los Angeles: The compelling guitar melodies and strong vocals of Karie Jacobson combined with the active drums of Drew Kowalski make for wonderfully likeable tunes.  Although mostly upbeat and a little dark and twisted, The Dagon's delicate side is explored on the elegant "Air" and the gorgeous closing track, "Sleep in Perfume." 

NEIL NEWS v3.9: Scientific. American.
 THE DAGONS, are back -- and their wrath is fearsome to behold! 
Their latest CD, "Make Us Old," recently arrived in the mailbox of 
my subterranean Glen Park dungeon, and it offers 10 new seething 
tracks of garage rock that are just the thing to dish up deserved 
punishment for your piety.  You might pick up traces of surf, even 
a little bit of country -- but the sheer damn difficulty you'll have
categorizing this disc is its main selling point, in a world where popular
music has seemingly gone mad!  Analog, baby -- ANALOG!!  Save the radio 
for NPR, and give this disc a listen instead. THE DAGONS have moved on to the browner pastures of L.A. but you can check their website at http://www.dagons.net or write Dead Sea Captain Records, 4470 Sunset Blvd. #163, Los Angeles, CA, 90027.  Or, inquire about the disc at Axis Records and Comics, 1431A Park St, Alameda: (510) 864-8682. (Neil McAllister)

PITCHWEEKLY BEST OF 2000
THE DAGONS Make Us Old, Dead Sea Captain: 
You smoked in bed/ and never woke again, Karie Jacobson sings on the opener to The Dagons' Make Us Old, instantly making concrete the air of dread created by the tune's eerily distant guitar intro.   Their ghostlier songs move at a crawl, but the Dagons' galloping country-tinged romps are equally effective. 

LA WEEKLY 
Project K, The Dagons, Maddog, the Rotters at Mr. T's Bowl:
... The Dagons, who recently relocated to L.A. from San Francisco, just released their second cd, Make Us Old (Dead Sea Captain), a collection of moody, sea-sick-swooning ballads with macabre lyrics that sound like Sylvia Plath reinventing Grimm's fairy tales. (Falling James)