Review: Tucker Riggleman & the Cheap Dates mine grief & misery with debut record, ‘Alive and Dying Fast’
The West Virginia alt-country band make quite the splash with their debut record.
“All my favorite people are in the ground,” Tucker Riggleman skewers life’s darkest days. The title track to his band The Cheap Dates‘ debut record slices through tremendous, unshakeable hardships. Arrving 10 months into a global pandemic, which has wrought havok and bloodshed, it feels both harrowing and necessary to exact the human exsitence in such a visceral way. Riggleman’s lyrics are as branding a skull-etched death rattle, high and mighty in the air, as his gaze wanders sorrowfully over the wreckage, snarling with smoke and glowing embers beneath his boots.
“Spill the Blood” writhes sideways in a similarly instictual and gutting way, fashioning percussion like one’s one heartbeat before it’s snuffed off the earth. “Sometimes I wonder when I’ll die,” the West Virgnia frontman unties, letting spools of existentialism and imposing dread twirling away from him. “A piece of comfort in my eye / That’s my hand in the coals / That’s the shadow on my soul.” His voice is suited for dragging your heart across concrete, a rock/punkishness fueling the rasp clinging in shreds to such poetic and forthright lamentations.
Riggleman grapples with time’s unpitying nature on the dirt-spittin’ “Manic,” which also finds him setting intentions to “love myself a little better this year.” With quite an extensive resume, as founding member of such DIY outfits as The Demon Beat, Prison Book Club, and Bishops, he navigates heart-piercing lyrics often with brunt force of a rhinoceros trampling through the Saharai ⏤ but that’s vital to the blood, poison, and misery pumping through his system. Absense of such towering emotional and vocal power would depelete the honesty so embedded in the songwriting.
Alive and Dying Fast burns like hot tar, from the murderous romper “Letter to Rose” to the working musician’s cry “Wild Card” (“Traded in my life in the holler / For making bad decisions with a rolled up dollar,” he weeps). With such an affecting debut, Tucker Riggleman & the Cheap Dates arrive as one of alt-country’s most promising and crucial keys for the future of the format.
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This article really hits the head on the nail about how a lot of other musicians and artists are feeling along with the loss of great folks like John Prine, Charley Pride, Joe Diffie, etc.. I’m definitely keeping my eye on these guys! Great write up!