Dawn Crosby died on the 15th December 1996.
It's sad a voice as startling and inimitable as hers has been silenced so prematurely. Every time I've listened to the Fear of God album WITHIN THE VEIL and been transfixed from its start to finish, even after it's ended I can always imagine Dawn's demon-child cries calling out in the darkness, echoing as if through marbled hallways lined with armless, sad-faced statues, or through a puzzle of deserted alleys at night in a drizzling but never-ending rain.
Her voice and her words were a perfect marriage, a singular response of disgust, doubt, or defiance against the engulfing darkness of life. Every enunciated expression of her pain - the low bitter growl, the wail of longing, the veiled seductions or chilling wordless fragments of melody - would have been torn from the center of the soul and not some dull periphery of a rational consciousness. And in that way, because she spoke directly to the heart, Dawn Crosby's beautiful and unearthly voice wired you alive, into the world inside her words.
A corrupting furnace of betrayals and prostitutions of body and mind, where the cold murder of hope takes place everyday,
sometimes for no reason at all, sometimes guided by real or imagined passions. Dawn was often the innocent thrust into that
furnace - in "Love's Death", in "Betrayed" - and she would inveigh against the trangressors with words that were a vengeful,
malicious pronouncement of retribution for them, but at other times she looked down, judged, and condemned the victim of the world -
as in "Emily" - but with so much bitterness and hurt you would know that she was that victim herself, and she was cursing herself
for giving in. The innocents always emerged from the furnace scarred and burnt, never cleansed, but always transfigured. The
transgressors were chastised, their punishments awaiting them. And when faith is inevitably broken, all that is left to do is
decide to which group you belong.
Dawn's songs are prayers, curses, invectives, litanies of love and anguish. But even as they chart the withering of the body and the
damning of the soul, they do so in a voice that declares its strength and inviolable liberty, saying that though life destroys, endlessly
bringing to us love and the death of love, those of us who find the strength to live will buy our freedom in both this wretched world and the
next.
R.I.P., Dawn Crosby...
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Gerald Tan 21/3/98.
Company of the Friendly Banterers.