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.
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