Fust at the Raccoon Motel -- April 12.
Saturday, April 12, 7 p.m.
Raccoon Motel, 315 East Second Street, Davenport IA
With their March release Big Ugly hailed by Americana Highways as "a big, riffy record full of Southern observations" that "may just end up being this year’s best album," the alternative-country talents of Fust headline an April 12 concert at Davenport's Raccoon Motel, the musicians from North Carolina also praised by Post-Trash for their "inescapable sense of wonder and excitement that's both exhilarating and full of charm."
Fust originated as the musical project of Aaron Dowdy and his friends John Wallace, Avery Sullivan, and Frank Meadows. Dowdy began Fust by self-releasing EPs and eventually self-releasing an album titled Evil Joy. In 2023, Fust released their second full-length album Genevieve through Dear Life Records, the sophomore effort boasting the singles "Violent Jubilee" and "Trouble" Upon its release, Genevieve was named one of "9 New Albums You Should Listen to Now" by Pitchfork, which later included the recording on its list of "24 Great Records You May Have Missed: Spring/Summer 2023. The following year, Fust released Songs of the Rail, a collection of demos from the years 2017–2018, and is now touring in support of last month's Big Ugly.
As stated Dear Life Records' DearLifezRecs.com Web site: "What does it mean to be from the South today? To try to reconcile the struggles and possibilities of Southern experience through songs, through words? Is it worth it? Are there secrets still worth revealing? Fust have made these questions the heart of their work and, more than ever before, it is the drama at play on their new record Big Ugly. Fust joins a long tradition of artists that have tried to present life in the dirty South, from the lived-in short stories of Breece and Ann Pancake to the traditional record-keeping of John Jacob Niles to the southern rock historicism of Drive-By Truckers. For these artists and for Fust, making sense of the South is a necessity because history is what hurts and in the words of Hemingway, our call is to 'write hard and clear, about what hurts.'
"Big Ugly is an 11-song testament to doing just that, with band leader Aaron Dowdy pushing his obsessions with country-storytelling to more mystifying places, hellbent on proving the elegance of grittiness in Southern life. The seeds for Big Ugly began when Dowdy – a distant relative of Maybelle Carter and the infamous Hatfields who grew up in southwest Virginia at the foothills of coal country – started taking trips with his grandmother to southern West Virginia over the past few years. Walking around the places she grew up, he was moved by how those melodramas of holler life from over half a century ago were afire in her still. Those trips came pouring over him when he was in Europe in 2023, longing for home and beginning to trace the outlines of a new record. There, he saw a millenia-old gutter on the ground, a shoddy yet time-honored remnant memorialized with a placard off the streets of modern Athens.
"'I’ve spent countless hours hanging out by fallen gutters out back of rundown houses throughout the South,' says Dowdy. 'I never thought to think of them as monuments of the future.' These two interrelated themes were the first two entries in Dowdy’s miles-long notes app for what would become Big Ugly and illuminate its core themes: the blurrings of past and present, the once magnificent now in disrepair, and how a certain love and honor for the squalor of today can become the promise of a future."
Fust plays their headlining engagement in Davenport on April 12 with an additional set by Merce Lemon, admission to the 7 p.m. concert is $19.84, and more information and tickets are available by visiting TheRaccoonMotel.com.
