Pressing Concerns: Fust, Arcwelder, Knowso, Still Ruins

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We’ve got two different Pressing Concerns going up this holiday-shortened week, and the first one’s a heater, featuring new albums from Arcwelder and Knowso, a compilation of EPs from Fust, and a new EP from Still Ruins. In other news, you can now browse the website by record label, which is a neat new feature to start off the year.

If you’re looking for more new music, you can visit the site directory to see what else we’ve written about lately. If you’d like to support Rosy Overdrive, you can share this (or another) post, or donate here.

Fust – Songs of the Rail

Release date: January 5th
Record label: Dear Life
Genre: Alt-country, folk rock, lo-fi folk, singer-songwriter
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Battering Ram

Most people’s introduction to North Carolina alt-country band Fust was last year’s Genevieve, an incredible collection of songwriting from bandleader Aaron Dowdy, realized with the help of plenty of collaborators. For me, the introduction was 2021’s just-as-good Evil Joy, the first “full band” Fust record and their Dear Life debut, but Dowdy had been making music under the name even earlier than that, too–on his own, he put out seven EPs (featuring four songs each) in 2017 and 2018. When Fust became more than Dowdy and his computer (adding bassist Frank Meadows, guitarist John Wallace, and drummer Avery Sullivan), Dowdy began writing for a full band and decided to “leave the computer songs alone”, shelving his initial desire to expand these twenty-eight songs beyond their initial, raw forms. After Genevieve brought a certain amount of spotlight on the band, however, Fust and Dear Life put together Songs of the Rail, a digital compilation of all seven EPs–nearly 90s minutes of music–in one place.

The Fust of Songs of the Rail is something that feels very different than what the group would become in the 2020s–not worse, not better, just different. It’s reminiscent of the jump from drum-machine era Friendship to full band-era Friendship, except even more pronounced. Speaking of Friendship, that band circa Shock Out of Season is a good starting point for Dowdy’s intimate, lo-fi bedroom pop take on alt-country that’s found throughout Songs of the Rail, and I also hear a bit of Lambchop and Bill Callahan in these recordings. The nature of these tracks–mostly recorded solely by Dowdy at home, with scattered contributions from Meadows, drummer James Gibian, saxophonist Ryan Hoss, and guitarist Sasha Popovici–results in a blurry picture, with songs running into each other as Fust moves from one sleepy-sounding idea to the next. I never listened to those early Fust EPs when they were on Bandcamp, so I can’t compare, but it does feel right to take in all of these songs (which were mostly recorded over two separate two-week periods in mid-2017 and early 2018) as part of–not necessarily an album, but a collection, a full documentation of a productive time period that nevertheless leaves plenty of unanswered questions.

Songs of the Rail begins strongly with the relatively upbeat “Leave the Forest” and the slow-moving, scenery-imbibing “Rolling Prairie”. Popovici’s saxophone colors “Cow Calls”, an otherwise steady, pacing piece of electric bedroom-country-rock. There’s no shortage of pretty folk-country songs throughout Songs of the Rail (“New Morning Clover” is another such first-half highlight), although my favorite moments on the record are the ones where Dowdy marries this side of Fust with an oddness that feels like a half-remembered dream–where he’s spelling out “Cabbagetown” in “Battering Ram” or when he makes his voice sound like an incantation while singing “Here in Midas / There in Medusa” in “Dark One”. Dowdy appears to have resequenced these songs from their initial release order rather than just presenting them all chronologically–“Abandon”, the first song he wrote in the collection, appears towards the end of Songs of the Rail. It’s a beautiful and strange song, aching but seemingly ripped from whatever context could’ve made its lyrics all click into place. Dowdy was right to follow where it led. (Bandcamp link)

Arcwelder – Continue

Release date: January 5th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: 90s indie rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Paul’s Song

Anyone who reads Rosy Overdrive regularly is aware of just how important the indie rock music of the 1990s is to this blog, including many, many bands who released music on Touch & Go Records (Silkworm, Brainiac, The Ex, Nina Nastasia, Shellac, Bedhead/The New Year…the list goes on). Despite this, I don’t have a similarly long history with Arcwelder–in fact, I only just listened to their most popular album, Pull, last year. Unsurprisingly, I enjoyed it a good deal and was impressed with how the Minneapolis trio merged the “Touch & Go sound” with that of the Twin Cities’–distinct from the way many alt-rock bands watered down The Replacements and Hüsker Dü for radio-ready singles, Arcwelder found a way to slow down the “punk” aspects of those bands while, if anything, turning their version of pop music into something even heavier. Although their most recent album had come out in 1999, Arcwelder never broke up, and, right on cue, they quietly put out their first new music in over twenty years, Continue, at the beginning of 2024.

If you wanted to call Continue a “mature Arcwelder album”, I wouldn’t disagree. They still rock here, although it’s in a more laid-back way, only occasionally rising to the level of “noise rock” across these eight songs. With some of the louder aspects of the band drawn back, Bill Graber, Rob Grabe, and Scott Macdonald’s pop song construction skills come clearer into focus here than in the past. I’m not even just talking about how the band incorporate it into their lyrics (see “Lafayette”, which begins the record with a surprisingly sentimental trip back in time to listening to rock radio in the 1970s, and “Paul’s Song”, a genuinely funny piece of power pop about a piece of writing advice that goes absurdly off the rails), but also of the harmonies and hooks that mark highlights like “Take It Slow” and “Swimming”. Although Continue is a digital-only release, it has a nice vinyl-ready sequencing, with many of the “hits” in the first half and getting slowly “heavier” in the second–“State of Decay” and “Borrowed” transitioning things into the closing duo of “Rooting for You” and “Integration”, which sound the most like Arcwelder of old, albeit wisened, and with writing that very much sounds like that of a three-decade old band. “As we move along and our gulf becomes wider / My last link to you is as content provider,” goes the surprisingly-affecting chorus of the former, and, in the latter, “Every mountain is Everest to climb, and to live I have to summit the peak”. In a way, it’s the heaviest Arcwelder has ever been. (Bandcamp link)

Knowso – Pulsating Gore

Release date: January 5th
Record label: Sorry State
Genre: Garage punk, post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Heavy Hauler

Garage punk trio Knowso have been skulking around the Cleveland underground for nearly a decade at this point. Bandleader Nathan Ward previously played in Cruelster and Perverts Again (at least one of which also featured current bandmate Mike Gill), and Jayson Gerycz drums in Cloud Nothings. They’ve put out a single on Total Punk Records and dropped two LPs on Drunken Sailor at the beginning of the 2020s; Pulsating Gore is their third album and first for Sorry State. All things (album title, artwork, label history) considered, one would be forgiven for expecting something significantly more hardcore- or metal-indebted than what Knowso actually offer up in Pulsating Gore. It’s a dark-sounding take on “egg punk” or “Devo-core” or whatever you want to call it–serious-feeling, blunt garage-post-punk in the Public Interest/Marbled Eye or DIÄT vain, yet more streamlined-sounding. The record’s Bandcamp page mentions that the lyrics are inspired by Ward’s day job as a trucker, which is the key to understanding Pulsating Gore: the way Ward pairs his horrifying, mundane, disquieting version of Americana writing with his dead-eyed, lucid vocal delivery is transfixing and effective.

It’s easy to imagine a good deal of Pulsating Gore originating as trains of thought in Ward’s head as he drives across the country, particularly the appropriately-pulsating title track and the cyclical preoccupations of “Do the Work”  (“All of this work is for the cycle of decay…/ Leave me alone and I’ll become eternal rot,” Ward deadpans, observing his eventual fate with a chilly remove). The eerie chorus that answers Ward in “Heavy Hauler” pushes an already-memorable track even further–it’s recognizably garage punk in its structure, as Ward depicts vehicles careening off ledges and futile struggles with nature in the lyrics. Ward also mentions an unsuccessful attempt to unionize his workplace as fodder for Pulsating Gore, and “Be Your Own Killer” and “Drink from the Lake” both take an appropriately dim view of powerful figures, the workplace, and American culture in general (although they both seethe with enough of a purpose to suggest that Knowso isn’t just the work of pure nihilists). “Where Do You Fit” closes the album with a pointed question (“Where do you fit, fit in the grid?”) and answers it with a simple, despairing refrain: “I wish they liked the circle, but they only like the square”. We’ll all lose our shapes eventually, but it’s cold comfort for those of us still having to make due with the hand the universe dealt us in the meantime. (Bandcamp link)

Still Ruins – S/T

Release date: January 12th
Record label: Smoking Room/Cercle Social
Genre: Synthpop, sophisti-pop, new wave, New Romantic, post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Perfect Blue

Still Ruins are an Oakland-based trio who’ve just released their self-titled debut EP, but the band have actually been around for a while now, forming as the duo of Frankie Soto and Jose Medina in 2018 and adding Cyrus VandenBerghe (of Welcome Strawberry) two years later. Although it may have taken a bit to get here, Still Ruins arrives fully-formed, with the trio nailing a sound straight out of the 1980s. These five songs find the band exploring polished, dreamy New Romantic pop music, confidently making their way through melodic, melancholic new wave and post-punk with the help of reverb-y guitar leads, synths, and vocals with an aching to match the instrumentals. Still Ruins recalls vintage dream pop, the more rock-based nascent version of the genre that still prioritized post-punk rhythm sections and strong songwriting instead of adhering to the vibe above all else.

“Silhouette” and “Perfect Blue”, the EP’s first two songs, introduce Still Ruins by showing off the band’s ability to create and present quite compelling pop music. “Silhouette” actually comes off as a bit understated and muted, even as the classic 80s-sounding synths and sweeping vocal melodies ensure that this song makes an impression. “Perfect Blue” is propulsive post-punk-pop, with the trio zipping through the track but not so fast that the core beauty of it gets lost. If you enjoy big 80s drum sounds, “Until Then” and “Of Devotion” lean on them to create the foundations of the dramatic center of Still Ruins, although the latter of the two in particular grows and expands to a busy-sounding piece of maximalist pop rock of which the drums are but one element. The reverb-y guitar flourishes that mark closing track “Left Against” help the track ensure that Still Ruins goes out on an upbeat note–and it also ensures that there are no duds on what ends up being a strong debut release. (Bandcamp link)

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