By Cora O'Malley
For Aaron West, this is hell. For Dan Campbell, Wonder Years frontman and that character's creator, this is probably his most liberating musical statement to date. As leader of the pop-punk troupe, Campbell, known as 'Soupy' to most, completed a trilogy of 'albums about growing up' last year with The Greatest Generation. Autobiographical in tone, they were full of personal lyrics dealing with his tumultuous 20s. For his first non-Wonder Years-related work, he's made an outright concept album full of low-key songs about heartbreak - someone else's.
Aaron West's marriage to 'Diane' is on the rocks, unravelling - along with his life - over 9 painfully intimate tracks, as We Don't Have Each Other sets the scene with Our Apartment; it has a country-esque tinge to it, stripped down almost to the bare bones as Campbell's rich storytelling sucks the listener in and takes them through a story in three acts. West sinks into drunken despair in 'Grapefruit', questioning his beliefs and whole life over a nuanced soundtrack of direct melody and punchy drums: "I'm sorry that I wasn't who you want / If I can't make you happy, I'm not good for anyone." It starts in a dark place and gets considerably darker from there, the contrast of uplifting melodies and the hard-hitting lyrics of tracks like 'Divorce and the American South' ("If I lay here long enough, maybe the bugs would eat me whole ... I had a dream that I went back north / The plane went down before we hit New York - you didn't come to the funeral") making things all the more downbeat.
The conceptual approach doesn't leave much room for filler, and the album's sequencing is thankfully watertight. Campbell's lyrics are the driving force of the record, married to a searing acoustic punk soundtrack on 'Runnin' Scared' (which features arguably the best chorus he's ever written), and ensuring that the gut-wrenching penultimate track 'You Ain't No Saint' is an album highlight. However, the real strength of We Don't Have Each Other is how raw, how real it all sounds, West's character delivered with such conviction that the listener has no trouble seeing the implosion of his life through his eyes, transported into that world, the job done as skilfully as the most immersive novel.
Campbell is a genuinely gifted storyteller, and West's story makes for brutal listening at times, but the coda to the album, 'Carolina Coast', allows a glimmer of hope to shine through, even as he's talking about killing himself, before finally making the resolution that he 'won't lay down and die / I'm not coming home tonight without Diane by my side.' Essentially a document of the worst year of a man's life, the album relegates its music to secondary importance - though not much can compete with Campbell when he's on form. If he decides to return to this project, it'll be interesting to see where both his and Aaron's lives go from here. We Don't Have Each Other isn't easy to digest, but its creator has scaled another peak.
