Big Ugly [LP]

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Fust - Big Ugly [LP] Fustthe lyrical powerhouse Southern rock band from Durham, North Carolinaannounce their new album Big Ugly, out March 7th on Dear Life Records, the record labe l that launched the careers of MJ Lenderman and Florry and that has become a haven for contemporary songwriters. Big Ugly arrives after the release of 2024s Songs of the Railaaeone of the best alt-country compilationsa¦in a long, long timea (Paste) and 2023s standout Genevieve, which unassumingly introduced new listeners to Fusts unmistakable blend of aaesmall-town poetrya (Mojo) with a familiar yet probing aaecountry-tinged folk-rocka (KEXP) that made it aaeone of the most fun rock records of the yeara (Pitchfork). Genevieve was their studio debut, recorded with producer Alex Farrar (Manning Fireworks, Rat Saw God, Tomorrows Fire) in Asheville, North Carolina. The reception was far better than the band expected, stirring them to immediately start working on Big Ugly, their second collaboration with Farrar. Recorded over ten days in June of 2024, Big Ugly is the explosive sound of Fust uncovering a freedom within their sincere form of loose and fried guitar rock, realizing more than ever before an intimacy within bigness. The members Aaron Dowdy, Avery Sullivan, Frank Meadows, John Wallace, Justin Morris, Libby Rodenbough, Oliver Child-Lanningweave their voices alongside guests like Merce Lemon, Dave Hartley (The War on Drugs), and John James Tourville (The Deslondes) to form a music that sounds like a conversation between old friends. And thats exactly what it is. At its heart, Big Ugly is a story cycle, following tough-skinned characters who seem to inhabit a shared and fictional small townBig Uglythat in reality gets its name from a lowly populated and unincorporated area in southern West Virginia around where Dowdys family has deep roots. The album coveraa mural from the Big Ugly Community Center just off the Big Ugly Creekwas painted by locals for a 2004 play performed by the children that interpreted their elders stories. In a way, Fusts Big Ugly does something similar as it takes the same area as its backdrop and reimagines a life depicted in the mural between the bars, gas stations, general stores, and double-wides. Throughout the album, we join the characters in finding history and meaning in the banal theater of their own private jerkwater. The songs on Big Ugly are hearteningly varied, moving from beer-fisted radio country to elegiac drones to deconstructed ballads. Songs like aaeSpangleda take up the theme of past traumas and present desensitizations colliding, of the small and cosmic coinciding in the life of a heedless protagonist. aaeBleacheda finds the soul-searching narrator recalling the feeling of inner vacancy in their childhood: thoughtless, speechless, herded around like cattle in backseats. And aaeMountain Languagea laments the poverties of Southern life at the same time that it promotes a higher poverty, a country utopia thats just out of grasp, where we could live if we could only aaemake it up the mountain again.a The mystical hermeticism and the dime-store everyday are two sides of every insignificant thing in the town of Big Ugly. Show more