Aaron West and The Roaring Twenties
We Don't Have Each Other

It's hard to realize that Aaron West is a fictional character. It's hard to grasp that the visceral and emotional words of these ten tracks are not real life.

I want to talk about the debut album of Aaron West And The Roaring Twenties, "We Don't Have Each Other", because it's destined to be my (belated) summer album of the year. Behind this moniker hides the leader of the American pop-punk band The Wonder Years, the bearded Dan Campbell. In the past, there have been other solo career attempts, like the good City And Colour (Alexisonfire) and the less fortunate yet excellent Alcoa (Defeater), but this seems to be the best, the most successful, and the most powerful. It ranges from the country folk with banjo of the opener "Our Apartment", delicate and sad, to the punk rock of the impetuous "Runnin' Scared" to the disarming and melancholic delicacy of the sole acoustic guitar of "Get Me Out Of Here Alive".

An album that does not require experimentation, innovation, or technicalities. It just wants to be a great record made with heart, played from the gut, that brings out those emotions that make us feel alive and powerful. And the association of this album with the still excellent one by The Hotelier is mandatory. Not just for the similar cover arts, not just for the sound sometimes in perfect harmony with some tracks from the respective albums, but for the fact that emotions are in charge, emotions are the true protagonists. These are songs and stories in which anyone could identify (just like in The Hotelier's album). There's a desire to vent, to let everything out, and tell the world "I exist too, I have risen from the darkness, and now I am stronger than before".

Each track could be a chapter of a novel, starring the thirty-year-old Aaron West, never fully out of adolescence but with moments of despair, perdition, and a bitter and hurried divorce behind him. "The Thunderbird Inn" is perhaps the track that stands out the most for emotional (violence) and vocality. Here, Dan Campbell/Aaron West pulls the best moment of the entire album out of the hat, giving a sense of joy after despair, calm after anger. He shouts, he makes himself heard in all his skill and leaves the listener with the sensation of a talent that only now, as a solo artist, manages to express itself one hundred percent. In the 38 minutes of the album, there's almost nothing close to the sound of The Wonder Years, Campbell's main band. And frankly, it's better this way. In all the tracks, rather, you can hear sounds and moods close to another great American country/folk band, The Mountain Goats. The reference to them is evident in the last track, "Going To Georgia By The Mountain Goats", a cover indeed.

Aaron West exudes Americanness in the lyrics, almost seems like a modern Sufjan Stevens (especially in the dreamy "Carolina Coast"), the "punk" little brother of Mark Kozelek (just listen to the poignant "Grapefruit"). His debut album is well done and never tires, not even for a minute. An album I discovered by chance and was immediately struck by. A record rich in sounds, full of true emotions, punk inside and acoustic outside. Ten tracks to discover, love, and listen to on melancholic summer afternoons.