Released via Dear Life Records in 2022, Fust‘s previous full-length Genevieve presented “love as a persistent yet uneven thing,” as we wrote in our review. “Something to be fuelled, protected, practised and ritualised. Modest in its own way and sacrosanct because of it. A painting never quiet finished, an ongoing crisis. A quiet thing performed in the grey hollows of the everyday.” Nowhere was this sense of perpetual action clearer than the song ‘Searchers’, a track we suggested was a key to the record. “Gonna trash the house, in search of what we’re losing / Now what we’re looking for is difficult to say,” Aaron Dowdy sings in the opening verse. “But it feels good to be a part of a greater kind of looking / Gonna be a searcher for the rest of my days.” The song started life as a collection of poetry, as Dowdy told us in the interview accompanying the review, about a group of people out looking very carefully for something they couldn’t name, perhaps didn’t even understand. “The attempt to turn it into a song started as a thought around what one loses in a given experience, that so much of our life is blocked out or forgotten almost immediately in order to forge ahead,” he continued:
This would mean we have a kind of identity that is composed of these negative attributes, things which never had names, which can’t be remembered based on our or at least my default kind of attention. This also extends to processes that run in the background. Sometimes I wake up and don’t know where I am or what stage of development I am at and it’s so devastating to realize how responsible my own narrative is for keeping everything in play that pertains to me. And so much gets lost to that narrative, but also comes back in flashes. So searching became a way to describe actively looking for those kinds of things.
If Genevieve represented an attempt to perform such a search within a relationship and personal history, then Fust’s new record Big Ugly widens the scope. A reckoning with Southern identity which looks to revive that which is lost to the narrative, and to locate and seriously consider those negative attributes amassed and repressed through the years. That is, to not merely position oneself within a wider history, but to appreciate the endurance of the past in everyday existence. To come to understand that years do not so much expire as accumulate all around. Like love in their debut, Fust offer the past as something persistent, if uneven. Because after all, what are memories if not their own form love?
So while opener ‘Spangled’ kicks things off with a familiar picture of Southern decline (“They tore down the hospital / Out on Route 11 / I’m not sure what happened / Seems like repossession”), the record pays as much attention to that which lasts in spite of everything. A position inspired by a pair of complimentary experiences Dowdy has lived in recent years. Firstly, the occasion he came upon an ancient gutter during a visit to Athens, and was struck by the fact that even our most mundane surroundings are potential monuments of the future. Then were the trips Dowdy took with his grandmother to southern West Virginia, where he came to understand how the histories that might appear to have eroded or dissipated from one person’s perspective were still very much alive from another. Both occasions complicated the boundary between the past and the present. What we once had, we will always have, in one way or another. Ghosts do not vacate their haunting grounds so easily.
As with any ghost story worth its salt, the result is neither wholly horrifying nor romantic. With the symbolic connotations of the title weighing heavy, ‘Spangled’ plays as a kind of alternative national anthem for a long-troubled nation. The realistic twin to its idealised original, detailing the vast, shadowy body of the American iceberg which supports the stars and stripes’ dazzling white mythology upon its tip. There’s God and loss and violence, a kind of directionlessness, heavy liquor, trauma as an echo through the ages. A sense of burning hard and bright and quicker than intended, sometimes arcing upwards but inevitably falling back exactly where you started. Or worse, into a decaying version of that same place.
Big Ugly functions as a detailed picture of such a milieu, offering small glimpses into the lives of various characters which move across the frame. The artwork is a mural taken from the Big Ugly Community Centre that once served as a backdrop to a school play. Here it serves an identical purpose, albeit in a more abstract light. We meet people wandering as though dazed in the post-industrial present, pining for hard labour and good wages, struggling to find hours selling junk at the gas station. Or struggling with small home improvements as their houses slowly fall down around them.
But also, most importantly, we see life continuing its rhythms, memories repeating, hopes emerging still. A picture of Appalachian or Southern life which does not yearn for escape or preach self-improvement, but loves and dreams instead. “They’ll have to haul me off,” as the title track opens. “Off a down slope / in some front end loader / in a pine box / if they want me gone / if they want me lost / If they don’t want my lonesome here / they’ll have to haul me off.” You are from where you are from, after all. A squalid home is home nonetheless, and the funny thing about fondness and pride is how they survive the most naked of truths. Fust aren’t interested in willful ignorance, rose-tinted reminiscence or giddy myth-making. The record wears its name for a reason. They want the big ugly whole.
Big Ugly is out now via Dear Life Records and available from the Fust Bandcamp page.
