Aaron West and The Roaring Twenties is as much a band as it is a story.
The band plays americana, sometimes with 6 or 8 or 10 people—a horn section, banjo, lap steel, strings and more—and sometimes as one man with an acoustic guitar and his voice. It's rock & roll with fragmented pieces of punk and country and troubadour-style sing-songwriter music taking influence from Springsteen, Rilo Kiley, and The Weakerthans. Some nights, it's somber and intimate. Some nights, it's loud, bombastic and joyous.
After ten years, two albums, an EP, and a single, the answer to Aaron’s brutal seeking comes in the form of his triumphant third chapter, IN LIEU OF FLOWERS. Not a collection of elegies so much as a concept opera, an ode to the underdog, à la the Mountain Goats’ All Hail West Texas or the Weakerthans’ Reunion Tour, Campbell and the band take AW20’s signature dynamics to new heights, marrying the crash of punk percussion and power chords with the roots twang of banjo and pedal steel.
