Fust

Big Ugly

Image of Fust - Big Ugly

About this item

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-Lanning––weave 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 that’s 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 town - 'Big Ugly' - that in reality gets its name from a lowly populated and unincorporated area in southern West Virginia around where Dowdy’s family has deep roots. The album cover - a mural from the Big Ugly Community Center just off the Big Ugly Creek - was painted by locals for a 2004 play performed by the children that interpreted their elders’ stories. In a way, Fust’s '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 'Spangled' take up the theme of past traumas and present desensitizations colliding, of the small and cosmic coinciding in the life of a heedless protagonist. 'Bleached' finds the soul-searching narrator recalling the feeling of inner vacancy in their childhood: thoughtless, speechless, herded around like cattle in backseats. And 'Mountain Language' laments the poverties of Southern life at the same time that it promotes a higher poverty, a country utopia that’s just out of grasp, where we could live if we could only “make it up the mountain again.” The mystical hermeticism and the dime-store everyday are two sides of every insignificant thing in the town of 'Big Ugly'.

TRACK LISTING

1. Spangled
2. Gateleg
3. Doghole
4. Mountain Language
5. Sister
6. Bleached
7. Goat House Blues
8. What’s His Name
9. Jody
10. Big Ugly
11. Heart Song

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