This album sounds like your brain on this album: Florry freaks us with a furious folk rock for the ages

 When Florry’s front person Francie Medosch was in high school, she skipped school to go on tour in her band. Recently, the twenty-something singer skipped out from her home town in Philadelphia to go work at a dispensary and a record store in Vermont. Florry sounds like the basement project, the garage project, the back-porch or front-porch project of someone who skipped class in high school and now works at the weed store in Vermont. “Sounds like . . .” is the name of the new Florry album. 

“Sounds like . . .” is a provocative title, because we scribblers of reviews, we love those points of reference to lure folks in. This band you may have never heard of, they sound like this other band you might have heard of. 

The synthy samply crunch clicks that open the album sound like late 90s R.E.M. and like nobody discouraged Florry from opening the album with a 7-minute track. Folks cannot seem to stop mentioning the likes of Dylan, Gram Parsons, and the Rolling Stones in their impressions. Florry is part of what writer and podcaster Steven Hyden calls the “Wednesday/MJ Lenderman Cinematic Universe” when he is not calling it “the same country rock solar system that includes Wednesday and MJ Lenderman.” Cinematic universe. Solar system. Florry sounds as cosmic as these metaphors. 

If it’s a scene or a movement, Asheville’s Drop of Sun recording studio seems to be the common denominator to this shaggy sound, the freaky fulcrum, portal, thin place, and power spot that projects these woozy sonics on the bedroom-wall interstellar-lightshow of our dreams. Yes, this album also sounds like they could be the black sheep cousin that got kicked off the recent Wilco/Waxahatchee double bill for jamming out too long. (That’s just an image that came to me, they were not on that tour, but now that I have said this, I wish that they had been.)

To add to all these references, I hear remnants in this jam-session-not-jam-band sound of the jangly and subterranean at the intersection of the 1980s cowpunk and Paisley Underground and SST scenes. You know, sounds like twangy punk rock, floating above the stage on things even stronger than those THC gummies of today, maybe a heroic dose or several, spiraling and giggling off the sky on acid and shrooms. That last sentence sounds like I feel dangerous, yes dangerous to even write for this sober but still crazy and psychedelic consumer of dangerous sounds. You know, “Sounds like . . . “ sounds like I might tell my sponsor that I don’t need a white chip from just listening to this album, but the sounds are simmering, I am definitely buzzed. 

Florry songs are fierce in their intimacy, drifting from sex to death to prayers. Early single “Hey Baby” growls with heartbreak and regret before chug chugging into dorky refrains sing-chanted over bar-rock burning guitars. “Truck Flipped Over ‘19” is a haunting meditation on highway fatalities. In fact, track 8 called “Say Your Prayers Rock” is a revision of “Say Your Prayers” from the band’s 2021 “Big Fall” album. “Dip Myself In Like an Ice Cream Cone” is a sexy summer skinny dipping song, dripping with more innuendo than the plaintive sad song simply called “Sexy,” as “Ice Cream Cone” slips into a slinky squelchy steamy conclusion. 

Florry are a band for whom albums are mere captures of the in-person in-real-life thing, only an audio placeholder for fans waiting to tap into their more free-flowing, far-flung, and feral live sound. Mind you, I have not seen Florry live yet, but looking up some live recordings of festival sets in 2023 and 2024, these sets really gave tangible traction to the trippy vibe that has me wanting to start spinning like on the lawn at a Dead show.

Yes, there are at least six people on stage, seven in this press photo. Yes, I hope that their van is spacious enough for them all. Yes, there’s fiddle and pedal steel. Yes, this sounds like the alt-country hippy-punk hoedown that this summer needs. 

Florry sound like all the 1970s albums in the discount bin, all the private-pressings that give a contact buzz from just fingering the moldy cardboard, all-wrapped-up in the primitive design of snapshots and scribbles, back when actual ball-point-pen doodles were better than fonts, long before the day of fonts that try to look like ball-point-pen doodles. 

But all the bluesy woozy shambolic and shamanic aforementioned antecedents aside, the amazing part is that Francie writes songs and lyrics that actually don’t sound like anything before Francie and Florry existed, being wholly new, even in how old they sound. Florry sounds like they don’t give AF that Francie especially doesn’t sound like anyone else that I can think of, defying even our best hopes to capture what “Sounds Like . . .” sounds like in the flawed format of a record review. 

Following the album’s late May 2025 release, Florry are going to spend most of June on the road, hopefully packing-out the smallish venues where they are scheduled throughout the east, south, and midwest, and I sure would love to capture one of their sets, to continue to aspire to and joyfully capture in rapturous prose what Florry sound like.  -Andrew/Sunfrog

Wandering with Wonder on the Streets of the Lonely World with My Politic

When I left my suburban upbringing as a young adult, I immediately sought urban life. On first moving to Detroit from its suburbs back in the late 1980s, I immediately took to long walks of exploration. Even earlier in the last century, radical philosophers celebrated the revolutionary implications of such wandering as “an unplanned journey through a landscape, usually urban.” 

On the title track to the new My Politic album (out everywhere since May 23), I sense a visionary & vibrant connection to urban pilgrims everywhere. Just as I walked to discover Detroit decades ago, singer & songwriter Kaston Guffey is seeking surprises on the streets of his new home in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, & in this case the psychogeography is boldly & blissfully infused with psychedelics. Pittsburgh provides setting & character for the new songs, a special city that blends east coast & midwest with an always Appalachian mystery. 

Guffey sings, 
I’m gonna take me a bus
Out to the museum of art
And eat just enough mushrooms
to have my mind blown apart
Follow the crooked streets
All the way home
Talk to strangers & bury my phone

The song “Signs of Life” (& the rest of the album too) narrates magic & wonder inside the same world so often wrought with uncertainty & grief. The entire set invokes “all this joy & all this misery.” Guffey builds emotional universes that are alternately cosmic & claustrophobic, sometimes saying the loud part quietly in that way that folk singers are wont to do. With the title track, that gift is singalong infectious, inviting listeners to return again & again to the rambunctious font of embracing said uncertainty & celebrating the urban wild. 

I discovered this prophetic folk duo in early 2022, right after their 2021 record Short-Sighted People In Power had dropped. Known as the duo of Guffey with Nick Pankey, their albums include guest musicians to fill out the sound. The first time I saw My Politic at Nashville’s OG Basement, they shared a bill with Adeem The Artist, & I approached & reflected on that evening with an overwhelming sense of gratitude for the incisive pertinence of the protest lineage with indie folk music. That protest tradition shows up most prominently on this outing with the blazing “Will We Ever Make It Out Of Heaven Alive.” 

Theologically & poetically, “hell” is often the preferred metaphor for the place from which the world needs a prison break. But not with this song. With this song, we are trapped in an unholy heaven of the hateful remnant. Due to the toxic certainty of the fundamentalists & nationalists crowding the churches, it’s no wonder that heaven suddenly feels even more carceral, an eternal punishment not fit for fugitive folksingers & all their freaky friends. 

This track reminds me of an old, old Flaming Lips number where the narrator rebuffs a street evangelist with the truism that “hell’s got all the good bands.” This might be the only proper full-stop protest anthem within the album’s 13 songs, so war, religious hypocrisy, gun violence, & capitalism all get their due. The track’s title is a question & the album vibes an authentic appetite of holy desperation that we might not have all the answers. We might be losing against authoritarians, but we aren’t giving up, we are at least singing with truth & revelation from within the confines of a live-streamed catastrophe.

I saw My Politic in person at another Basement show a couple years after that 2022 introduction. In early spring 2024, I brought my 80-something mother. We had struck out on getting Bob Dylan tickets in Georgia, & this show felt close enough to Dylan, but much more intimate, like the early Dylan we would soon see reenacted by Timothee Chalamet on the wide screen. After that experience, my mother genuinely wanted to know why folk songs are so sad. She might have said “depressing.” I didn’t have a good answer, except to say that sad songs make me happy. “No Other Way” certainly fits the bill for the sad-happy paradox in this collection. 

But perhaps the most collectively-rendered version of that on this record is “The Lonely 21st Century,” which tracks our addictions to addiction, our data-mined daily expressions, & our “connected isolation.” Yet the gut-punch beauty of that track is just this: I am less lonely & isolated from having heard it. I am even grateful to my dreaded phone & excellent headed phones for bringing these songs directly to me. All this, of course, makes me want to pierce the isolation on the social, physical plane, which means I need to see My Politic live again, which I hope to do soon. 

As good as this new My Politic album is, & it’s extremely good, the best way to experience Kaston Guffey & Nate Pankey is in their live set. The first tour with this new record starts in just a few days. You can get all the details on the album & the tour at their website www.mypoliticmusic.com -- check it out. 

Celebrating the southern gothic jangle punk of Murray Attaway

 

There are many trails, threads, & backroads that feed my adopted southern identity, but several travel through Georgia. In early 1987, my nineteen-year-old self spent about 8-weeks in an urban intentional community seeking solidarity with our neighbors living on the street. Something about winter in Atlanta changed me. 

By then, I was already an R.E.M. freak, & I was still a decade away from my first deep-dive into classic southern literature, which at first meant Faulkner, even though Flannery O’Connor always seems to be falling off the shelf & into my soul, much more recently in the Maya & Ethan Hawke biopic. But if I am transparent about my near-magnetic attraction to the rural south that had me settling down in Tennessee within a decade of that Atlanta stint, it wasn’t short stories & novels, as much as I love them. It was the civil rights movement's history, it was milder winters, it was mountain backroads, & it was outsider folk art like Howard Finster, & it was music like Guadalcanal Diary.

To say I was obsessed back then (& now) with Guadalcanal Diary’s punked-up ecstatic-mystic rendering of “Kumbaya” would be an understatement. They were one of many mid-80s bands that I simply fell for & hard & their version of Kumbaya was always central. 

As the Diary’s front-person & primary songwriter, Murray Attaway mentioned in a podcast interview, that Kumbaya was then in-the-mid-80s an obscure campfire jam & not the common parlance pejorative jab that it has become. My response to the cynicism around “Kumbaya” as a concept has been to retort with earnest glee, “but have you tried it, have you really tried singing kumbaya?” Lotta of contempt-before-investigation going around about such an incredible song. 

But none of the cheese-&-cringe scout-camp tape-loops that birthed the cynical cliche to wield like a rhetorical baseball bat against “Kumbaya,” none of the purveyors of this miserable recycled trope probably have any idea what kind of primal glory could be obtained by a jangle-punk version of this song, especially when just unapologetically jammed out by some 80s-alternative kids in a sweaty club. 

That I could be returning to this “lord I want to be in that number” kind-of-moment some 40 years later is delicious, not nostalgia so much as homecoming & eternal return. I got to see & feel & sing along with the jangle punk Kumbaya in-person, with Murray's old Guadalcanal bandmate Rhett Crowe joining in (Rhett joined the ensemble on "Vista" as well). But I get ahead of myself, as that was the last-song of a two-song encore at the end of the two-date record-release Georgia tour for Murray Attaway’s first solo album in more than 30 years, almost 40 years since the fiery four-album-run of the Guadalcanal Diary canon & fierce touring years.

The already familiar eight songs on “Tense Music Plays” officially dropped on May 9th (get it on Bandcamp or order the physical album, only three singles are streaming). Were it not for my sibling podcaster & music obsessive friend Scott Greenberg telling me about the album on the April edition of the Music Nerds Record Club, I might not have known about it at all. A new Murray Attaway album just wasn’t on my radar, nope, not really at all. But thanks to Scott & advance listening available to radio folks, I was immediately in. 

Then relistening addictively to all the old Guadalcanal Diary tracks on repeat for a few weeks & discovering Murray’s early-90s solo album “In Thrall” for the first time (which I somehow missed back then) & then seeking out every remote YouTube interview with Murray over the past decade or so, I was tossed into audio-mystical deep-dive sanctum of revelation & discovery. Insights & inspiration knocked me over. 

See, the distinctly southern outsider-poet lyrics coupled with that guitar spangle jangle sparkle tangle is my spiritual musical sweet spot, so much. Both as Guadalcanal Diary & now as Murray Attaway, it’s swelling, hooky, earworms, making meaning & memories. Words & deeply religious sensibilities are simultaneously universal & specific & never dreary & dogmatic. Musically, they are so much a part of my lineage that returns in the 00s with Band of Horse & My Morning Jacket. Lately I have found that sweet spot with the likes of Florry & Fust. 

But when I left I-75 to take the backroads through the north Georgia mountains to Athens on steamy Saturday in May, this is the soundtrack of kudzu climbing in clumps of tall trees & church-signs screaming holy ghost declarations. These are the sounds of places like this. I am grateful I sought this night like a desperate pilgrim. I had to shoehorn this amazing experience in-between two already-scheduled events & add lots of miles to my Toyota to make it happen. The Athens set that I caught included most of the new album & a wide selection of Guadalcanal Diary “hits” that had a gaggle of 50-&-60-somethings singing along & dancing like silly children. 

While I have become much more the devourer of southern lit today in terms of poetry & novels than I was then, southern rock in all its complications & iterations is much more the mother tongue of what southern gothic & southern cultural identity mean to me. My friend Mark Kemp really developed a redemptive thesis about this & I would include Guadalcanal Diary in the bands that deliver the sounds that help redeem our complicated & conflicted southern souls. 

Murray Attaway’s complete catalog is world-building & mood-inducing, always haunted by weird characters but also hopeful & harkening to Georgia as home base. I could scribble for days more about why we need music that is religiously informed & inspired without retching reactionary toxicity, but to find that in what is basically path-blazing southern indie-rock is just incredible. 

Murray Attaway & Friends

The Foundry in Athens, Georgia

May 17, 2025

Setlist -
Little Birds
Stars Behind The Moon
Michael Rockefeller
Trail of Tears
Breath
Old Christmas
Better Days
Under Jets
Never Far Away
You Were There
Litany
Allegory
Hole In The Ground
Always Saturday
Vista
Cattle Prod

Encore-
Cattle Prod
Kumbaya (with Astronomy Domine by Pink Floyd snippet)

Changed (TOTR 497)

 

-originally aired on WTTU 88.5 FM The Nest on Saturday, May 3, 2025
-listen to the audio archive here - 
Stream Changed - TOTR 497 by Teacher On The Radio | Listen online for free on SoundCloud
-this is the concluding show of the 2024-25 academic year; we return in August
-with this episode, Teacher On The Radio celebrates the 16th anniversary of his continuous abstinence from alcohol
-all views only represent the host & the artists played, never the student managers or the Communication department or the university

Miles Caton - I Lied To You
Lonnie Hailey - A Change Is Gonna Come
Valerie June & the Blind Boys of Alabama - Changed
Panda Bear - Praise
Bon Iver - Everything Is Peaceful Love
Palmyra - Can’t Slow Down
Jeffrey Lewis - Tylenol PM
Murray Attaway - Stars Behind The Moon
The Waterboys - Live In The Moment, Baby
My Morning Jacket - Die For It
Father John Misty - Mahashmashana
Jesse Welles - Simple Gifts
Mumford & Sons - Carry On
Ray LaMontagne - Long Way Home
Florry - Drunk and High
MJ Lenderman - Under Control
Friendship - Chomp Chomp
Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band - Flashes of Orange
Fust - Jody
The Snake The Cross The Crown - Behold The River
Jerry Joseph - Days of Heaven
Chris Brain - New Light
The Alarm - I Melt With You 

Tech’s hilarious spring show “Somebody/Nobody” is a topsy-turvy takedown of celebrity culture

 The rambunctious riptide of a comedy “Somebody/Nobody” is the spring production at Tennessee Tech’s Backdoor Playhouse. Jane Martin’s topsy-turvy theatrical takedown of celebrity-obsessed culture was conceived in the late aughts/00s, before the boastful explosion of Instagram, which has only exacerbated our addiction to a daily dose of likes, clicks, stories, and shares. 

In her campus directorial debut, Jennifer Gallegos does an amazing job with this crazy content and the talented cast and crew. In the Director’s Note, she confesses that she loves this text because it’s silly, and she invites us all to forget our worries and woes for an evening of nonstop knee-slaps and gut-laughs. But as surrealistic and silly as the entire plot and premise are, there’s plenty inside to ponder more contemplatively about ego, identity, and human relationships. So come for the laughs, but stay for the self-awareness and self-love. 

Playhouse newcomer Abby Mynatt is simply stunning as frustrated superstar Sheena, alternately cranky and charismatic and forever charming, even when Sheena is surely annoying everyone else on stage with her delightful diva moves. But Sheena is only one of several compellingly unstable characters. Just when you think things cannot get weirder or wonkier, they do, such as when Sheena’s show-stealing agent and notorious enabler Galaxy arrives on the scene, with Lily Cunningham’s captivating and eye-catching crash-and-burn interpretation. As bold and bizarre as all that is, Sheena’s punk-rock stalker portrayed by Drew Coburn is a small but sweetly strange part of the bigger picture. There’s incredible costuming and choreography to all this that just needs to be seen! 

While Sheena is billed as the “somebody who wants to be a nobody,” the play’s primary comedic tension and contrast comes with Lolli, the folksy and endearing “nobody desperate to be a somebody.” Lee McGouirk’s down-home rendering of Lolli is more than a continental road trip apart from Sheena. That far-out cultural friction is more than Kansas-versus-California, it’s about how we are all vulnerable and insecure at some part of ourselves, no matter how we cover it up with overconfidence or chatty self-deprecation. These two powerful female leads really carry this story and captured this reviewer’s heart with their magnetic performances.

While Lolli’s colloquial coziness is also curious and courageous about choosing California, even greater contrast comes from the affable outsider Jo Don, a survivalist cousin from Kansas who has come hunting for Lolli but quickly has eyes for Sheena. Still motivated by his great work in the recent Godspell, Zeke Eckert energizes everyone with his jovial Joe Don. The intentionally tense space between the four main characters crackles with cut-up after cut-up. Also of note, Chris Margraves as Beverly rounds out the cast with a minor role that helps bring major closure toward the end of the second act. 

Tumultuous and hilarious twists and turns are an amazing aspect of this off-the-rails inspection of the human personality. This over-the-top story entirely transpires in a simple but at times claustrophobic Los Angeles apartment with bars in the windows (shout-out for more great Playhouse set-design for this show). 
Your time at this play will fly by due to the fast-pace frivolity, which does traffic in some red-state-versus-blue-state stereotypes and other content warnings that should be noted for some mild sexual situations, comedic violence, and awareness around self-harm. But all these dramatic devices contribute to an ultimately redemptive message that we all need to feel, about being comfortable in our own skins. 

Once again, the student actors at the Backdoor Playhouse are bringing us engaging, enlightening, and entertaining theater. Don’t be a nobody, invite somebody and go check out this show! 

-Andrew W. Smith, teacher, poet, DJ, and Cookeville’s local theater critic for 20 years

The Backdoor Playhouse is at the rear of the Jere Whitson Building, just off Mahler Avenue and the main quad in the heart of Tech’s campus.
Performance Dates:
April 24, 25, 26 at 7:30 PM with an additional matinee Saturday, April 26 at 2 PM.
May 1, 2, 3 at 7:30 PM 
Tickets are only available at the door and general admission, so plan to arrive early to get your seat. General admission is $15. Seniors are $12. Students with I.D. are $5. On May 1 only, faculty and staff tickets are $5. 

Alive (TOTR 496)

 -originally aired on WTTU 88.5 FM The Nest on Saturday, April 19, 2025
-you can listen to the audio archive here:
Stream Alive - TOTR 496 by Teacher On The Radio | Listen online for free on SoundCloud
-This episode features From Dreams We Emerge, the new album by Hayden Mattingly & Honeybrook, along with an exclusive interview with Hayden Mattingly, Mike Harrison, & Cody Smith at Sunday Drive Studios
-We will also celebrate the album release on Thursday, April 24, 2025 at the Wesley Arena (271 E 9th Street), with performances by Hayden & Honeybrook & special guest Casey Neill
-all views only represent the host, interviewees, & the artists played, never the student managers or the Communication department or the university

Hayden Mattingly - Alive
Hayden Mattingly - Candlefish
Hayden Mattingly - Dreams
Hayden Mattingly - Isabelle
Hayden Mattingly - Fossanova
Hayden Mattingly - Broken
Hayden Mattingly - Visionary One
Hayden Mattingly - Highland Dig
Hayden Mattingly - Second Stand
Hayden Mattingly - South Wind Says
Casey Neill & the Norway Rats - Savages
Casey Neill & the Norway Rats - In the Swim
Casey Neill & the Norway Rats - The Ones You Ride With
Casey Neill & the Norway Rats - Meteor Shower
Casey Neill & the Norway Rats - Sending Up Flares
Casey Neill - Riffraff
Casey Neill & the Norway Rats - Radio Montana
Casey Neill & the Norway Rats - All Summer Glory
Fust - Spangled
Fust - Gateleg

Glorious gusts of spangle jangle folk-rock with North Carolina’s Fust

 

Discovering, digging, then diving in, then falling hard for a new band that already fills a sweet spot is such a warm fuzzy maple syrup feeling. Right now, we are swooning over a gust of Fust, their brand new album Big Ugly & a current tour of tiny venues throughout the southeast. (To be fair, 2023’s equally addicting Genevieve was also on my radar, but I had not fallen this hard into the sweet realm, going all-the-way in with an obsessed fandom.)

In this case, the sound that is swallowing me is already achingly intimate, a sprawling dusty & expansive soulful southern folk-rock, that evokes & invokes an intoxicating indie music that shaped me in my late 30s. Fust ruffles the edges of alt-country, feeling familiar on the headphones or cranked up in the car that is careening down the gravel roads & tasting the local honey of aughts/00s acts like Band of Horses, My Morning Jacket, Bon Iver, or Magnolia Electric Company/Jason Molina. 

It’s not just the swelling guitars, fiddle, & keyboards that shake & slay me in my deepest parts; it’s the addictive feeling I find in the restless place-based poetic lyrics sung-with-hunger & feeling by the sweet-tea & cheap-beer croon of lead-singer & lyricist Aaron Dowdy. This front-person poet of ginger-curls & professor-spectacles does double duty as a PhD grad student in literature at Duke University, when he is not touring with this amazing six-piece band, which shares several members with fellow-travelers Sluice. I have no doubt that it’s Dowdy’s literary sensibilities that so fully foster the feral world-building of Big Ugly & its backroad stories & blackout fables.

I finally got to this Big Ugly record more than a month after its March 7th release & have placed it in steady rotation ever since. The record revs into my audio soul with “Spangled”; it steals your heart from its opening strums & the album keeps you choogling-&-chugging in its setting of a West Virginia locale. “They tore down the hospital” condenses the abandonment of American rural infrastructure in a poetic stanza, but the point of Big Ugly is also finding fierce beauty in the fight against blight. Road names & room numbers never sounded so good as when sung in this blistering banger that I want on repeat for this entire spring & summer.

Track two is called “Gateleg” & might be the spiritual thesis of the record for me, the way Dowdy reimagines & inverts Dylan’s Maggies’s Farm to be situated in the small-town retail-&-gig-economy. The one-two hooks of “Spangled” & “Gateleg” bring me back to the opening two songs on the Band of Horses’ 2007 album Cease To Begin. That album, also recorded in Asheville, always took me deep & fast into the rising rapids of loving life with “Is There A Ghost” & “Ode To LRC.” I swear it’s not deja vu or nostalgia, this reverent newness of oldness that always was, always is, & was always good, forever amen.  

My students prefer the term “relatable” when discussing lyrics as simple & memorable as these on “Gateleg”: “Like the cans, bags, tins, and smokes/All the pull-tabs and OTC rolls.” The chorus says more than it clearly says about the economy & the culture & it already says a lot: “You ain't gonna work on the line no more/You're gonna work at Maggie's store.” Things clicked even further in my mind at the Louisville show, when Dowdy told me a little bit about his academic research & writing, about the things that could have been, in that other world that we always said was possible. I am enchanted by the fascinating fact that his dissertation director was renowned literary-critic leftist Fredric Jameson, who sadly recently passed.

When a band hooks me by the heart-&-guts like Fust does, I love to devour the journalistic buzz about a new record, & this one has aplenty. The search engines led me to incredible long form pieces over at Paste by Matt Mitchell & Anna Pichler. In addition to my above-mentioned antecedents & fellow travelers, another reviewer also placed Fust in conversation with John Prine & the Drive By Truckers. Their album was engineered by Alex Farrar at Drop of Sun Studios in Asheville, also making them very specific contemporaries of rising western NC star MJ Lenderman. 

“Jody” is a jam that centers love & alcohol with immediacy & intimacy & every listener from a rural area can visualize that “outside fridge.” The title track “Big Ugly” brings it all together with its anchors in the dirt, with its allegiance to a river, with its lonesome loyalty to land & place that says they will only ever haul me off, if & when it’s in a pine box. This admission of a deep & thorny sense of home, even when some of our neighbors betray us as misfits or  even call us traitors, it gets redeemed in the southern jangle spangle medicine that holds this album both shimmering & aloft, as well as deep deep inside. Poetic meditations & problematic regional morality aside, the gust of Fust hooks simply hook me as I cannot help but to hum & sing along.  

When you are as addicted to a new record as I am to this one, I needed to rearrange my week to find a way to catch a show, which we did at Louisville’s Zanzabar. Nashville’s glorious garage-psych siblings the Styrofoam Winos have just joined Fust for a week, & it was really great to see the Fust gang join the audience, standing near the front to support the Winos, as they amazingly switch instruments & rotate vocal duties on every single song. Jake Tapley’s set to start everything was also stellar. Wow.

The entire Fust record rivets-&-rocks with such believable stories & characters, they all bring me back to dip my bucket again & again, each track acts as a haunting hymn that my mind-body-spirit simply needs. I am sad that I only got to see one show on this April leg, but am already eyeing their dates opening for SG Goodman come fall. 

Fust (with Styrofoam Winos & Jake Tapley)

Zanzibar in Louisville, KY

4-16-2025

Setlist:

Big Ugly 

Gateleg

Doghole

Jody

Bleached

Violent Jubilee

Mountain Language 

Heart Song

Open Water

Sister

Spangled 

Fust are a 7-piece on the record & a 6-piece live; the album credits are:

Aaron Dowdy: guitar, vocals, and synth

Avery Sullivan: drums and percussion

Frank Meadows: piano and percussion

John Wallace: guitar and vocals

Justin Morris: guitar, pedal steel, vocals

Libby Rodenbough: fiddle and vocals

Oliver Child-Lanning: bass, vocals, dulcimer, and synth