Fuses’ ‘Garden of Ashes’ Channels Byrdsian Haze Ahead of ‘Sawdust in the Transmission’
‘Garden of Ashes’ is a hell of a calling card, and as the first glimpse of ‘Sawdust in the Transmission,’ due June 26, it tells you exactly what kind of album Fuses have made: patient, bruised, and quietly gripping.
It opens with a soft, chiming figure that feels as if it has been sitting around for decades waiting for the right hands, something in the slipstream of The Byrds if you want to pin it down. But there is a weight underneath that pulls it away from pastiche, a low-slung, late-night gravity closer to Jason Molina at his most stripped of ornament. What really sticks is the way the song refuses to bloom in any obvious way. It simply hovers there, suspended, harmonies brushing up against each other, pedal steel trailing like a thought you cannot quite finish.
The story behind Fuses threatens to sound too neat on paper, Sweden and Canada, files sent back and forth, plans falling apart. But the album never leans on that as narrative ballast. Instead, you hear it in the construction, in the slight disjunction between parts that do not quite line up in a conventional sense, yet feel more human for it, as if each element has traveled a different distance before landing in the same place. That gives the whole record a kind of internal weather, small shifts in pressure.
When they finally get into Nacksving, that old Gothenburg room, there is a decision to let the songs sit in their own grain. That means ‘Sawdust in the Transmission’ never tips into something merely old, even when it brushes up against the textures of Fairport Convention or the softer end of classic country, because it is too preoccupied with its own quiet momentum.
‘Garden of Ashes’ balances narrative storytelling with metaphor and explores themes of endurance, memory, and emotional complexity… the track turns out not to be an introduction so much as a distillation, the whole album already there in miniature, patient, a little worn at the edges, and completely sure of its own pace.
Headline photo: Victor Cornelius
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