The album takes off like a freight train with You Can’t Go Back to Where You’ve Never Been. A barraging tale of a hard start (“I was baptised by the spittoon and the chamber pot at three/and I never saw the faces of the ones who conceived me”) leading to a desperate man hurtling head first into a violent, hard destiny.

The tempo cools to an icy stretch with Good Country People, a bittersweet folk ditty about a drifter motivated by insecurity to the theft of a prosthetic leg and the palatial yearn of My Dark Tower, which features exquisite guitar work by Jeff Fielder. Before I Sour begins fittingly with a church organ but is punctuated by eruptions of rock blasts to vast away the shadows. The spare beauty of On Holiday showcases Fuller in her powerful, open nerve of a voice.

Unlike many that use the Southern Gothic style in music Lindsay Fuller is not about camp and irony but is a dead-on wordsmith singing dark but beautiful tales of common people in hard times in sometimes peculiar circumstances that are told in a way that seem like it’s as natural to them as rolling out of bed in the morning, and then killing the neighbor.

The CD cover has Fuller standing in a field. Wearing a simple cotton dress, axe in one hand and an old fashioned typewriter in the other. This is a perfect visual metaphor for the work contained within. As Winter covers this morally wavering Nation with a cold, grey blanket sit back with a Cormac McCarthy or William Gay book and put on Lindsay Fuller and The Cheap Dates as a fitting accompaniment.

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Lindsay Fuller – You Can’t Go Back to Where You’ve.mp3
Lindsay Fuller -  My Dark Tower.mp3

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