In Lieu of Flowers, the third studio album from Aaron West and The Roaring Twenties, adds another chapter to West’s ongoing saga.
AW20’s previous two studio albums and EP took a personal approach to how West grappled with grief, loss, and divorce. What makes this group unique is that Aaron West is completely made up. He’s the brainchild of Dan Campbell (frontman for The Wonder Years) and grew out of a one-song experiment to see if a fictitious conceit could offer emotionally potent responses to life’s darkest moments.
AW20’s previous two studio albums and EP took a personal approach to how West grappled with grief, loss, and divorce. What makes this group unique is that Aaron West is completely made up. He’s the brainchild of Dan Campbell (frontman for The Wonder Years) and grew out of a one-song experiment to see if a fictitious conceit could offer emotionally potent responses to life’s darkest moments.
In Lieu of Flowers pushes the answer much closer to yes than the previous two albums were able to. While the band’s force often overwhelmed the goal in the past, this album finds them taking a measured pace through a set of music that furthers West’s fictional story while harkening back to a very real shared tragedy: the COVID-19 pandemic.
The pandemic is never stated as such but is brought to mind in several places. On the rollicking “Roman Candles,” which is set in “early March,” Campbell sings: “Mom works at the hospital / says every shift feels like a curse / She’s never seen people this sick before / and says it’s only getting worse.” It’s a safe bet that most people who hear those lines will superimpose 2020 after “March” on the next listen.
On the Counting Crows-esque “Paying Bills at the End of the World,” West observes a church service on a lawn before confessing, “I’ve been having that dream where I’m dying again / the one where I get sick, and we can’t afford it.”
As the album progresses, West takes on a kind of Everyman of the Pandemic stature. He gets work to cover his losses as a musician, busts his hand pouring cement, attempts a disastrous tour in the UK, and enters the downward spiral of a drinking problem.
Many aspects of West’s story are experiential touchpoints (whether you’re a musician or not), even (or perhaps especially) alcohol abuse. In the U.S. and other countries, rates of alcohol abuse increased dramatically as people struggled to cope with fear and anxiety over facing death, the financial implications of getting sick without health insurance, or how to pay bills with no job. The emotional scope of the pandemic gives AW20 a setting big enough to absorb the force of its colossal sound.
If Americana was the progeny of pop-punk and emo (and partly raised by Bruce Springsteen), you would call it AW20. This large band (I counted 16 people on their Spotify picture—but maybe not all of them are musicians?) displays admirable (if relentless) energy while remaining light on their feet amidst the changes of the four-piece guitar band at its core. Their sound palette can include horns, strings, steel guitar, banjo, piano, and sundry instruments at any given moment.
The explosion led by a tenor sax (echoes of Clarence Clemons) in the latter half of the first song, “Smoking Rooms,” illustrates the band’s raw power. Yet not once is Campbell’s voice overwhelmed. Dude’s got pipes. His range is impressive, but he also tends to sound strident. While his tone matches West’s acerbic wit, one welcomes songs like the closer, “Dead Leaves,” where his voice shows its age, fraying around the edges and giving it some vulnerability. The ballads also give him the chance to explore other vocal tones. When he breaks into a quiet falsetto on the chorus of the country heartbreaker “Whiplash,” it’s more beautifully emotive than anything else on all three albums combined, if only because the contrast is so unexpected.
Many other aspects of West’s story (which are dealt with in the previous albums) are brought into the third chapter. Still, as our troubled hero progresses through rehab to the album’s closing proposition (which lands right around the 45-minute mark), the landscape he has wandered through becomes as memorable as the character himself. Perhaps more so. Ultimately, AW20’s grand experiment is something of a non-sequitur. Autobiography or fiction, it doesn’t matter. When an artist finds the intersection of shared and individual grief, it hits home.