Album of the Week | Fust: Songs of the Rail

No band caught my attention more in 2023 than Durham alt-country outfit Fust, the project of singer/songwriter Aaron Dowdy. Their LP, Genevieve, struck a chord in me quickly; Dowdy and co.’s brand of small exits framed in the context of pathetic love stories and community lamentations stirred deep in my soul. Every year I discover a new band, but I can’t remember being this excited about one. And the iteration of Fust we got in 2023 was filled out by Avery Sullivan, Oliver Child-Lanning, Justin Morris, John Wallace, Frank Meadows, Indigo De Souza, MJ Lenderman, Xandy Chelmis, Michael Cormier-O’Leary, Courtney Werner, Alex Farrar and Sasha Popovici—making Genevieve a true North Carolina love letter from concept to application. And, to boot, we had the joy of including Fust’s track “Trouble” in our list of the 100 best songs of the year and Genevieve on our best country albums of 2023 roundup. In my opinion, it’s only a matter of time before the band is no longer the South’s best-kept musical secret.

And now, Fust is back with a titanic release set to vault this momentum forward even more so. Songs of the Rail is a 28-song archive of the group’s earliest iteration, when Dowdy—in March 2018—called upon Meadows, Wallace and Sullivan to help him turn a batch of demos into full-band versions, all before the name Fust had even registered. This album, however, is not a collection of sketches; Songs of the Rail arrives nearly as complete as Genevieve did last summer. Sure, some of these tracks end abruptly—as demos sometimes tend to do—but Dowdy’s filled-out sound is an obvious set of risks and transformations. He took these 28 chapters, which he wrote largely on guitar on the couch of his home in for six months after breaking out of a creative dry spell, put them on some EPs (that you can’t find on Bandcamp, so don’t bother) called Warp & Woof and Nightfall and Gilder and then, miraculously, fleshed them out with his closest collaborators.

I have to note that the song “Rolling Prairie” is already primed to be a contender for one of my favorite releases of 2024—even if it’s more than five years old. The sonic palette is colored by a combination of rusty guitar and soulful piano; it sounds like it would bounce off the walls of a dive bar beautifully. Dowdy’s vocals are animated like a slow-burning campfire crooner’s, as he reckons with missing someone whom he once dreamt he’d see everything through with. “You’ve been down and empty, and I’ve been feeling nothing,” he sings across the chorus. “I got sick last year, the kind you know that’s always been there. You’ve been loud and angry and you’ll take all the money, and I’ll go to the prairie out of harm’s way.” It’s one of those songs that isn’t flashy and doesn’t need to be, because the brilliance is in the language, in that perfect, sometimes indescribable pairing of syntax and melody that is more tangible than poetry. When it works, it works. Magic doesn’t always need justification; it just needs to exist.

You can feel that across Fust’s entire discography, how Dowdy can articulate life’s small moments—no matter how ugly the memories are—and make them feel familiar and joyous enough to carry any given story to completion. Take a song like “The Side of Returning,” for example, where Dowdy slurs across a spacial guitar melody. There’s a quick pluck of background harmonies that shine here, too, when he sings “So let me go, ‘cause in my way I’m gone to the claim of another love.” It’s a messy song by design, ending in an unexpected stop that quickly bleeds into “Deep Black”—a track we are introduced to as if it’s already been going for at least a minute.

Songs of the Rail shines in batches, most notably in a string of four tracks at the end of the album that I keep returning to—“Ban the Way I Look, pt. II,” “Mingled, Mingling,” “Passing on Patience” and “It Will Too Later Ache”—because of the guitar work on them. Dowdy and his team of players know how to do blues and honky-tonk-inspired Americana just right. And there’s something so innately beautiful and gravitational about a good six-string lick, especially one that is as mangled, jangled and sublime as the guitar we hear on “Ban the Way I Look, pt. II.” It’s a great example of Dowdy’s surreal lyricism, too, especially when he sings “Ban the way I coo and soften my bellow. Do you like it when they call you a locust? No, no, but I can’t stand to be a crow.” “Mingled, Mingling,” however, is the standout of the four, remarkably for its comely, swooning sonics that wrap so effortlessly around Dowdy’s vocals. “This life has been a disappointment, this life has been spells, doubts and reposing,” he sings. “Mingling with the wrong good people, I took them hand in hand, did a lot of them wrong, though I’d love to roam with the great ones in the light of day.”

Dowdy never lingers on one piece of imagery too long, which helps the record feel like a combination puzzle more than some assembly rid of intentionality. “I’m so far in this song, I can’t bring you along,” he sings on “Hot Hands.” “I’m a bull talking alone, weighing in with psalm.” If you are a fan of Genevieve, you’ll be delighted by the familiarity scattered across Songs of the Rail. It’s a lovesick album that, like Fust’s most-recent offering, stews on endings, doubts and regrets. “Time can’t make this work,” Dowdy proclaims on “Farther and Farther”; “There is an aimless mountain, there is a calmer stream where part of the mountain drifts aimlessly. Let’s find a rebel, let’s find a means, let’s leave and drift and breach the harder things,” the world goes on “Widely Wade”; “I miss you tenderly, low is where I go,” he sings on “May Here Be Enough.”

And “May Here Be Enough” is a stripped-down ballad that puts the focus on Dowdy’s singing, as Popovici strums gently behind him and James Gibian’s snare rummages through the melody just as delicately. “Jerome” is a mid-album standout, as Dowdy channels his inner Bon Iver and turns his alt-country blueprint into an airy, atmospheric set piece. “Abandon” works through digital moods, too, and is Dowdy’s best vocal performance on the entire album, as he tests the limits of his own falsetto and doesn’t miss a step. It’s moments like these that the homegrown, cobbled-together nature of the project’s origins shine through. Songs of the Rail perfectly merges lo-fi underscores with more polished, touched-up patterns. It’s not always obvious where the songs from the EPs end and the never-released treasures begin, but you can sense that Dowdy had an aim about this project’s sequencing—that this was not just him dumping more than two-dozen songs into a folder and calling it a day.

Songs of the Rail holds unique perspectives to dig into; it’s a real collage of what Dowdy’s life looked like before he made Evil Joy and Genevieve. “So long to my lover, so long to my kin,” he hums on “For Comrade,” a gentle, wayfaring masterclass that is soulful like a teardrop and melancholic like fluttering grief. “We were comrades, but I won’t see you again.” Luckily for us, it’s obvious Fust will return to us with more to say, more to sing. Across all of Songs of the Rail, none of the work feels as dated as it literally is. I can picture the bare-bone crumbs of these songs being workshopped in green rooms, alleyways, basements and makeshift studio spaces. It all sounds dashingly good, and that’s a mark of true, iconic brilliance. Fust are now a crucial part of the contemporary music lexicon and, for a set of demos (and a massive one at that), Songs of the Rail is one of the best alt-country compilations I’ve heard in a long, long time.

Matt Mitchell reports as Paste‘s music editor from their home in Columbus, Ohio.