Aaron Pinto by Aaron Pinto

'Aaron Pinto'—the debut album from Aaron Pinto

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Rare are the artists with such obsessively conceptualized visions that they reveal unto us all profound new insights into the sacred Source from which all creativity flows. Enter Aaron Pinto.

Aaron first launched into my orbit in 2011 as a sage keeper of an encyclopedic amount of musical know-how, when I was still knee-high to a grass blade, starting out timidly on my new college path, mostly straight-edge, but just beginning to tip over into curious-kitty territory, mind expansion-wise. A formative time. Lacking a strong identity of my own, I clawed toward connections with the likes of heads I hitherto knew naught of. Art and band people: trendsetters and culture makers. In one of my earliest memories of Aaron, we are in his dorm, and he's asking me if I'd ever heard 'McCartney II'. I hadn't. When he took "Temporary Secretary" from the top, it was one of those occasionally transcendent moments in life wherein it dawns on one just how little they actually know about anything.

Raised on a steady diet of everything from Motown to Trenchtown, Aaron grew up a music scholar's son, constantly in search of great melodies. Let it be known that upon entering college, Aaron's aspiration was to be a writer for music magazines. But his own tunes, as they had been, kept coming, and it wasn't long before his tune changed. "I want people my age writing about ME," says Aaron. "I didn't want to be in my 40s and 50s resenting not putting out music. At least I now have something to point to."

And point to it we will, with jabbing fingers, eyes wide skyward in reverence. Aaron Pinto's self-titled debut double album, 'Aaron Pinto'.

Immaculately conceived in inspired bursts over the past twelve years, 'Aaron Pinto' is the culmination of a lifetime's worth of fanatical listening and devoted craft-honing, delivered with so much raw gusto and passionate urgency that to hear it is to be rocked to the floor by the fire in its creator's heart.

It's so much, this album. It's what happens when a self-espoused idiot savant finally goes for it and does the damn thing. It's a time capsule chronicling the decade-plus-long evolution of an inimitable musical mastermind. It's a collection of serendipitous happenstances that could never in a million studio retakes be recaptured. It blows my brain clean open to know that it was recorded entirely by one person, mostly with a Skype mic in a basement on the border of Trenton, NJ.

I listen to these songs and see sold-out stadiums. I see YouTube wormholes. Fans attempting note-for-note covers. They've done it with The Beatles, and they'll do it with Aaron Pinto. But as they can't with The Beatles, so too will they never wave a stick at the fearless, fun, and focused swagger of Papa P (not to be confused with OG Papa P, Papa P's papa).

First things first: The drumming on this album is some of the best we'll hear in the game right now. In The Motherfucking Game. It's a wild child idiosyncratically channeling Moon the Loon's mania and reimagining the most enduring of the Funk Brothers' licks and R. Starr fills out there. It's a master at work at the peak of his prowess laying it all out on the kit for the world to go ape to. Listen to the breaks in "You're My Old Routine" and tell me I'm telling tales out of school.

'Aaron Pinto' is an album invoked by a devout believer in the art of the song. It attempts and succeeds in answering two basic yet indispensable questions: 1) WWTBD? (What Would The Beatles Do?), and 2) "Is the song there or is it not?" The answers ring out from Jersey to Liddypool and beyond: 1) The Beatles would shit their mop-tops if they knew what wonders their own work hath vicariously wrought, and 2) This is a man single-handedly bearing the burning torch of his dreams into fruition, so yeah, the songs are HERE.

We fire off on all cylinders, naturally, with "1st", a song originally written with Aaron's other musical vehicle (alongside Matt Louridas), Quadruple A, in mind. With a guitar riff that would reduce Jeff Lynne to mouth-foaming convulsions of pride and joy, we're hot out the gate with a bona fide blastoff and whiplashing swiftly by way of reversed guitar into "A Good Vibe's Sleep", which will make you question how a guy who's only been playing bass since 2002 (when his family inherited one via ring toss win in Seaside Heights) can wield a four-string as forcefully as Macca ever did. Those slide-ups! Considering that it ranks among the most memorable on the album in terms of vocal harmonies and calls and responses, it might be surprising to learn that "A Good Vibe's Sleep" was actually one of the earliest recordings to make the cut, dating back to 2012.

The exquisite architecture of this magnum opus will leave any champion of the full album experience enraptured. Short songs like "Tired of Chasing You 'Round", sturdy in their own right in terms of all instrumentation, play their part in the larger world of 'Aaron Pinto' by propelling us into bigger bangers. The 27-second-long "Wishing It Was Us", where for a fleeting glimpse Aaron reaches deep within himself to dispatch his yearning soul's true grit (a vocal performance rivaling the most animalistic of any of Avey Tare's), is an integral piece in the grand picture, as it drops us off into the bomb that has always been and will forever be "Hey Little Blonde Girl". The official first single, "Hey Little Blonde Girl" has been waiting to crash-land on our ears for nigh on twelve years. Aaron's scream in it screams, "I MADE this." It's lightning caught in a bottle, that scream - an expression of a cosmic amount of emotion that could not go unexpressed. As prime an example as any of the lengths Aaron will go to give voice to the sheer scope of all that which he contains.

Don't get me going on the vocals, or I might not get off. Too many completely peerless Pinto'isms to numerate. His forward-urging huffing ("uh, uh, uh, uh") toward the end of "And I Always Know". His rhythmic scatting ("Ah-rume-bai-oom-ba-ooh-beh") in "Over U", evoking the wordless vocables on the best of anything off 'SMiLE'. His soprano stunting throughout "Seems So Far Away". The blood and chocolate in his throat as he belts out "I Hate Your Boyfriend", in quintessentially Costelloian fashion. All the earnest yeahs and babies that hearken us back to the '60s rock roots from which Aaron has gloriously grown.

Some of the more experimental choices on this album will deliver heroically no matter how frequently it's revisited. The borderline apeshit spitting mouth sounds à la Alvin Band throughout "Wishing It Was Us". That insane zapping build-up into "And I Always Know". The trickling plucking in the background at the start of "You're My New Routine" (presumably produced by striking the strings at the peghead of the guit?). Aaron can recount the facts behind every aural nuance in Day-Glo detail. For now, all we can do is dance, and if we sing along, we sing our hearts out.

It's impossible to listen to the 8x7x8x7 smashers that make up the four sides of 'Aaron Pinto' and deny their power, which is not to pigeonhole this project to "power" pop. These waters run deep. We have the all-time reggae-rock scorcher "And I Always Know". The floaty, 'Eternally Even'-era Jim James-like psychedelic slop machine "Expectations", featuring one of the two instances of keyboard on the album (the other being the organ noodling in the intro of "You're My New Routine"). Motor City meets Kevin Parker in every snare crack. The "lo-fi" stylings of the likes of Dr. Dog and early GBV coursing through the nerves of it all. The genre is hits.

Ultimately, thematically, this is a love album. Made with love about love, in all its messy and complicated tribulations and triumphs. While songs like "You're My New Routine" paint an idyllic portrait of a healthy form of romantic love, many others are borne from the more harsh side effects that love (or a lack thereof) can induce: the dark stuff of resentment and spite. It's an album for the ghosted ("Left on Read"), the lustful ("Yo Girls"), the jaded ("Tired of Chasing You 'Round"), those embattled and embittered still seeking enamorment ("The Eternal Question"). "Love, Yourself" may be Aaron at his most vulnerable. In it, he goes from mourning being left behind by friends whose relationships have evolved beyond him to quoting his shrink: "Aaron, you need to accept reality."

Come the end is "Corinne (I'm Sorry I Let You Go)", as elaborate an articulation of musical mastery as any from the last seven decades. In a bravado performance conjuring wistfulness incarnate, we're left with the sound of a wounded but hellbent soul stripped of everything but an acoustic guitar, defeatedly accepting friendship in lieu of all that which could've been with someone special once let go, and now gone.

I sit at the end of this album in silent awe of a singular visionary. A DIY-or-die player whose arrival has at long last been emphatically announced. Let it be a summons to us all to chase our dreams with abandon, as if the very fabric of space-time depends on it. Let it rightfully place Aaron at the forefront of the queue to stardom. Let it be a rain that can't be abated.

With this I leave you to surrender yourself to a seminal achievement of the human spirit: Aaron Pinto's self-titled debut double album, 'Aaron Pinto'.

–Peter Emanuel Hadjokas

Aaron Pinto is a solo act in the truest sense of the word. On his debut album, this year's "full rock band"-passing double album, 'Aaron Pinto', everything you hear was done by Pinto, solo. 'Poprock Record' calls the album "a sprawling 30-song statement of artistic intent, a musical manifesto of sorts that vibes punk, sixties throwbacks, and DIY power pop." Dig it.