by David Wilikofsky
Aaron Dowdy has been writing songs for over twenty years, largely recording them in bedrooms. Genevieve, the second album from his six-piece band Fust, marks the first time he has recorded his songs in a professional studio. In addition to his bandmates, Dowdy invited a number of indie luminaries to collaborate on these tracks: Indigo de Souza, MJ Lenderman, and Michael Cormier-O’Leary to name a few. On paper it sounds like the kind of album that aspires to reinvent a band’s sound for a wider audience, but more than anything Genevieve is a refinement of Fust’s craft. Though the recordings may be slightly more hi-fi and the lineup expanded, the beating heart of Fust’s music, Dowdy’s songwriting, remains its focal point.
Genevieve sounds like an album in the classic country tradition. Though you get plenty of beautiful instrumentals, like any great country album lyrics are at the center of everything. Each track feels like a short story as much as it does a song, building an entire world in just a few minutes. A torrid love affair winds to a close, memories of the couple’s time together flashing by. Communities come together to search for nothing in particular. Factories close down and the people who lose their livelihood figure out how to scrape by. Characters that pepper the album almost seem to leap out of the speakers, each one made animate by the power of Dowdy’s words.
Much of this power comes from the specificity of Dowdy’s writing. We constantly hear names, both of people (Sarah Lee, Jimmy, Sam, John, Angel, the titular Genevieve) and places (Rockfort Bay, Bridge Street, California, New England). Dowdy sings about celebrating a birthday with paper plates and candles, the way light pours into a kitchen, the rattle of a car door coming up a driveway. These characters and settings start to take on a life of their own; you can easily begin to imagine Sarah Lee as your neighbor or Bridge Street as that dead end road just a few blocks away. In turn, as each song starts to feel real the emotional undercurrents of each begin to take on more and more weight. You feel the mix of resignation and pride in “Town In Decline”, the quiet resolve of “Late Hour”, the longing of closer “A Clown Like Me”. This is the power of both Dowdy as a lyricist and Fust as a band: they take the ordinary and manage to transform it into something both universal and sublime.