FUST - Big Ugly

And there would be no record, nothing left standing, to show that anything had ever been built in America.

(Philipp Meyer, “American Rust”)

America is a haunted land. Ghosts of a dream that no longer exists, shadows of a nightmare from which there seems to be no waking. The spectre that once inhabited a hospital room now floats in the void: they tore everything down, a matter of debts and foreclosures. Not even a scrap of life left to cling to, for eternity.

Aaron Dowdy comes from Bristol, Virginia, a Confederate stronghold during the Civil War and home of the Carter Family. He's the soul of Fust, one of the key names in the new American alt-country scene: fittingly, the label is the same one that helped launch MJ Lenderman, Dear Life Records. And it's the leader of Friendship, Dan Wriggins, who handles the introduction to Dowdy and co.'s new album, “Big Ugly”: “Mountain rock and Southern literature, dedicated to that inextricable entity made of land and people, to visions of community, utopia and testimony to erosion.” A genuine endorsement, in other words, one that shows how Fust, on their third album, have found a voice capable of capturing the essence of American rust.

The rough chords of the electric guitar, softened by the countermelody of the pedal steel, quickly give way in "Spangled" to Dowdy's voice, both vibrant and soft, steeped in deep-rooted inflections. It's the ghost story we started with, populated by the specters of a present haunted by the past: "I don't think you can hear the word 'Spangled' without thinking of 'The Star-Spangled Banner', the American national anthem," explains Dowdy. "I wanted to write a kind of personal, painful version of the national anthem, made up of esoteric and typically American themes, like trauma and time out of joint, self-destruction and intoxication, fragility and arrogance." It's the feeling of plunging off a highway overpass, falling without ever stopping, suspended in a sky studded with stars: "Who's the god of that sky/ And who's the god of memory?".

Along the family tree that runs from Son Volt to Colin Miller, Fust sit on a branch where an innate sense of melody shifts from the country laments of "Bleached" to the rock edges of "Goat House Blues". Over the drums' solemn pace, "Gateleg" turns the Dylanesque farm of Maggie into something that seems its exact opposite: a corner of Appalachia at the foot of the mountains where, perhaps, among dusty shelves cluttered with cans and empty beers, it's still possible to find some meaning. The band's name, for that matter, also comes from rural slang and refers to the lingering smell of mildew: it's the smell Dowdy remembers from childhood, when he used to visit his grandfather in Virginia. Even today, for him, that smell is the symbol of the tension between something crude and out of place and a kind of romantic ideal. Just like the South he grew up in, the South he tells of in his songs: a place to flee from, at first, yet also a home to return to. A contradiction that sums up that of America itself.

The South of Fust is made of love and hate, like the feelings that linger in the air of their North Carolina: from the streets of Durham, where the band is based (and where Dowdy is a PhD candidate in Literature at Duke University), to the recording studios of Asheville where the album took shape, with Alex Farrar at the mixing desk (who has already worked with the likes of Wednesday, MJ Lenderman and Waxahatchee).

It's the "Big Ugly" that gives the album its title, the muddy land where a creek can take its name from its own ugliness: "I've got the mud of Big Ugly running through me," Dowdy confesses over the rustic-flavored folk of the title track, "And I'll never get it off or get it out".

It's the lost language of "Mountain Language", which recovers the crackling electricity of the Nineties and steals its words from Shakespeare to lay bare the hardest question of all: "Oh, what country, friends, is this?".

And it's precisely Dowdy's literary streak – with Faulkner's pages close to his heart – that is one of the essential traits of the songs on "Big Ugly". A few strokes are enough (a lightbulb to change, bread left on the table, the sound of rain) and the slow-motion rhythm of "Sister" has already told a whole story, in which the fiddle's aching song speaks to the struggle of picking up the pieces when something inside has broken ("I whisper 'Should we get up?'/ 'Why, so the pain can get up too?'"), in the name of a rarefied songwriting style in the territory of Chris Bathgate.

Once again, the words Dan Wriggins dedicated to this album are the best interpreters of Fust's music: "It's the long, enormous river of storytelling, fed by ancient springs, that holds up time, bounded by landscape and by people, and bears witness to everyone's beauty and anguish." The ghosts haunting America are full of stories to tell.

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26/09/2025