@colekincart (words n’ photos)

Last Friday, I had the pleasure of heading over to Lincoln Hall to catch Fust on their fall run opening up for S.G. Goodman and her latest album. Before the show, I’d been bouncing around the city trying to shake off whatever daylight savings fog I’m still in as everything suddenly is dark at 4 PM, and I’m still taking it personally. Since I had some time to kill before heading to Lincoln Hall, I ended up at the Hard Country Honky Tonk at the Empty Bottle for their 33⅓ anniversary which basically set the tone for the night as this pseudo–country evening in Chicago. Not a sentence I get to say often, but honestly it worked.

Somewhere between the two-step crowd and the general chaos of the bar, I remembered how excited I’d been to finally see Fust. Big Ugly has been a consistent revisit for me this year (especially over the summer!) and as I’ve fallen deeper into the whole North Carolina musical ecosystem, the band has ended up being one of those anchors I keep circling back to. I found them during my relentless (and ongoing) MJ Lenderman deep dive (still workshopping names but the “MJ Cinematic Universe (MJCU)” is the current contender ), and it immediately clicked how tightly woven the whole Southern music world is. No MJ appearances on Big Ugly, but their earlier record Genevieve features Indigo De Souza, MJ himself, and Xandy Chelmis, which pretty much confirms the universe theory.

Fust feels like its own branch of that whole tree, though as it sits somehwere between the indie southern rock and this alt-country-adjacent, y’allternative, whatever-title-Brooklyn Vegan-has-used genre sphere. If you’re into Sluice or Weirs, that’ll get you in the general neighborhood.

The band themselves are a stacked crew:

Aaron Dowdy (guitar, vocals, synth), Avery Sullivan (drums), Frank Meadows (piano), John Wallace (guitar, vocals), Justin Morris (guitar, pedal steel, vocals), Libby Rodenbough (fiddle, vocals), and Oliver Child-Lanning (bass, vocals, dulcimer, synth). There were also little sprinkles of Alex Farrar and Merce Lemon on the latest album (again, the universe is real!). 

Aaron’s songwriting is what keeps me hooked though. There’s this sincere, questioning tone in a lot of his lyrics that feels like someone thinking through something in real time instead of offering a nice n’ neat conclusion. I don’t know if I’m placebo-ing his whole deal, but the fact that he’s a PhD candidate — “in dissertation mode,” as he said recently — makes me feel like, yeah, he probably knows exactly what he’s talking about.

I was still a little bummed to have missed their headline tour this spring, so seeing them on this fall stretch felt like catching up with something I’d fallen behind on. They played some stand-outs of the new album — which included “Gateleg,” “Mountain Language,” “Sister” — and all songs sounded incredible live and somehow bigger than on the record. And of course, they closed with “Spangled,” one of my top songs of the year. “Spangled” is also a verb I’m fully adopting. It just feels right.

If you get the chance to catch Fust soon, do it. Keep an eye out! This whole NC wave keeps expanding, and it feels special to watch it in real time!