On Live at the Austin Outhouse, Texas country legend Blaze Foley’s haunting, lasting live album, you’re able to hear bits and pieces of background noise push through Foley’s fingerpicking and his deep, warming voice. The bar-goers rustle, a beer bottle clinks here and there, and brief conversations take place as Foley sings “Clay Pigeons.” In Ethan Hawke’s Blaze, a rare music biopic equally unique and wonderful, the Outhouse sequence shows pool games taking place, blank stares from the crowd and Foley wandering around—until a door opens to reveal that it’s daylight out. A captive audience this was not.
The character of Aaron West has played to crowds like this for years. As the frontman for Philadelphia pop-punk five-piece the Wonder Years, Dan Campbell has grown comfortable with hearing hundreds of people sing his lyrics back at him every night. His side-project, Aaron West and the Roaring Twenties, is a character study about a songwriter hitting rock bottom—a path that Campbell has managed to avoid. With the project’s latest album, In Lieu of Flowers, the nonplussed audience makes an appearance. Campbell’s acoustic guitars and sighed lyrics on “Smoking Rooms” are surrounded by low chattering, the kind of ambiance you’d hear in a bar that’s a little busier than expected. This is a risky choice—it could be didactic to kick the album off with West’s confessional songs being ignored so literally—but it pays off in a sudden eruption of electric guitars and saxophones. It’s an early and critical example of In Lieu of Flowers’s surprising hopefulness, an indicator that these songs just can’t be ignored.
Aaron West and the Roaring Twenties has always been an ambitious project, an attempt to turn Campbell’s gifted, vivid pop-punk storytelling into something that has literary seriousness and folk songster credibility. In the past, Campbell has sometimes struggled to balance the character’s miserable backstory and his melodic levity, particularly because that tonal balance is what makes the Wonder Years such a remarkable band. Parts of the Roaring Twenties’ debut, We Don’t Have Each Other, are so literal about Aaron West’s divorce, his unborn child and the death of his father that Campbell’s lyrics occasionally erode the album’s emotional potency. But since 2016’s Bittersweet EP, the home of this project’s crown-jewel “67, Cherry Red,” Aaron West and the Roaring Twenties has been about slow recovery. 2019’s Routine Maintenance found West traveling across the country, forming a country band and eventually learning to be there for his family—especially after his sister’s husband passes away.
When we meet West again on In Lieu of Flowers, he’s found his way back to playing live shows, trying to make connections with old friends and new, drinking casually at first and trying hard to help raise his nephew. The setting is bleak at best, with highlight “Roman Candles” beginning with a paraphrase of the “Runnin’ Scared” drumbeat from We Don’t Have Each Other and motivated acoustic guitars pushing the song towards an uncertain future. “Ain’t that the thing about hope? / Each spring the Mets’ll win the pennant,” sings Campbell. In Lieu of Flowers’s beginning draws attention to its pandemic setting, noting anxieties about not being able to pay healthcare bills or containing a verse about West’s mom working at the hospital. But opposed to music that is exclusively about COVID-19 or awkwardly shoehorns it in, Campbell’s songwriting has a light touch, like a diary entry from a time that we’ve all tried to erase.
When it comes to Aaron West, it’s easy for the plot mechanics to consume much of the conversation. But In Lieu of Flowers contains some of Campbell’s best melodies and soaring choruses. There’s the rising, triumphant hook on “Monongahela Park,” which pairs nicely with the track’s story of rekindling an old flame. On the title-track, Campbell crafts one of the year’s strongest songs out of a package of horns, strings and understated apologies—peaking with a hollered chorus, which is punctuated with the line “I’m with you ‘till the bitter end.” And on “Alone at St. Luke’s,” the booming folk-punk groove—complete with horns from the Roaring Twenties’ newly unveiled 16-piece lineup—manages to make West’s loneliness while touring sound like a rallying call. “We might as well be drinking,” he shouts, both victorious and setting himself up for failure.
In Lieu of Flowers concludes with a cavalcade of twists, and lands on West finding hope for the near future in this open-ending narrative. On the riotous “Runnin’ Out of Excuses,” West seeks rehab after his drinking starts to accumulate steam again. The aching, belted chorus slightly recalls “A Song for Patsy Cline” off of the Wonder Years’ No Closer to Heaven—if that downtrodden narrative was underscored by piano chords and exasperatingly strummed acoustic guitars. The album’s conclusion, “Dead Leaves,” begins even further in singer-songwriter territory—note the occasionally overbearing touches of pedal steel—and finds West retracing his steps, going back into New York City and encountering something (or someone) shocking from his past. It’s a startling, paralyzing moment of sorrow on an album that’s found spurts of optimism. But West manages to brush it off and head towards his band’s show in the Village that night, finding certainty when it’s most needed. He has more songs that need to be sung.
Read our recent profile on Aaron West and the Roaring Twenties here.
Ethan Beck is a writer from Pittsburgh who lives in Brooklyn. His work can be found at Bandcamp Daily, Paste Magazine, Washington Square News and others.
