It hits you about a minute & a half into “On My Own”, the first song on Dakota’s debut album “Heart & Soul”. That’s when the drums and the bass kick in and begin to lift the song into the stratosphere, channeling the Manic Street Preachers and The Cure and Morrissey and the Pet Shop Boys and god knows who else into a glorious soaring noise.

Disembodied voices creep round the edges of the mix like ghosts and the song sweeps up to an emotional climax in a wash of ambient noise before a cloud of guitars sweeps you away into the spurned lover lament of “Wild Child”, the bitterness & regret couched in a gorgeous melody that lodges in your brain after just one listen.

It’s an audacious start for a new band but one that’s more than justified by the music that follows. The 10 songs that make up “Heart & Soul” reveal Dakota to be the missing link between the sweet sad pop of the 1960’s and its harder anthemic 21st century counterpart. They’re a British pop band in the classic sense – natural melodicists with a taut under-pull and muscular brevity - tough and tender at the same time - and poised to be huge.

Which is pretty much what Ben Talbot had in mind all along. After all, he’s been dreaming about it for years, ever since his music teacher grandmother showed him the rudiments of piano at the age of three. The guitar came at 7 and Ben was writing his own songs by the time he was 9.

Two years later and Talbot was well into his “Hamburg” phase, learning song structure and melody the hard way – two hours a night every night playing Beatles songs and current pop hits to foreign exchange students who lapped up his solo shows gave the emerging star a solid grounding in the practicalities of giving an audience exactly what they want wrapped up in new songs they don’t know they need.

But somehow it just didn’t happen. Struggling to make ends meet as a professional musician, Ben “did a lot of session work and a lot of production for local bands. I ran a studio for a while and learned so much production-wise. Then I met the guys and everything fell into place”

“I’d known Tom for a couple of years but I didn’t actually know he was a musician, which is crazy. Aaron lived locally and when I put the word around that I wanted a guitarist, he came forward saying he was the man for the job. Then I met Bob in a pub, a friend of a friend. It just all fell into place that night. We all played together straight away to see if it worked. We ended up jamming all night. “I thought I was going to be producing sessions for the rest of my life. So to get this opportunity with such great guys is everything to me.

Taking their name from the New York apartment building where John Lennon lived & died, Dakota had one last weapon to add to their arsenal – a life-changing event for Ben that fundamentally changed his music and gave him the emotional charge to create “Heart & Soul”.

It was, inevitably, a girl. Ben thought she was the one, but she wasn’t, and he found the aftermath of their split hard to deal with: “I didn’t understand it. I wanted to scream ‘Why don’t you love me? How can I make you still love me?’ There was despair, anger and hurt”.

Retreating to the beaches of Devon gave Ben a chance to reflect on that hurt and confusion, and ultimately to channel those feelings into the creation of “Heart & Soul”: “I thought I’d lost everything when my relationship broke down. I was here, there and everywhere just trying to get through it by recording these songs. I was traveling around, in one place, then another place, and felt like my car was my home. The sea seemed to lap up my pain and give me a new inspiration. It was the end of summer and I didn’t think I had anything to look forward to. I was broken and bruised but these songs just seemed to happen. A broken heart is something everyone can relate to. We’ve all been there after all”. And the result is a stunning record from a stunning band, full of pop classics in the making…

* Shake Verdict: This has the potential to really take off this year. While like ALL music, you can compare it to others, its strong melodies and precise delivery ensures that it’s a strong stand alone release. The production is crisp and it sounds great at home, in the car, at the bar, on the radio, on your stereo - I’ve tried them all… It’s such an easy record to find yourself lost in and if they can deliver live, then I expect really great things from them in 2010… Now f**k off and listen to them for yourself… Jj