MJ Lenderman has never been hard to root for. His debut full-length, a scrappy, self-titled collection of simultaneously wry and earnest tracks, the shortest of which being just over four minutes, demonstrated an immediate harkening to the earliest alt-country bodies of work. Two years later, he struck again. 2021’s Ghost of Your Guitar Solo readily picks up where MJ Lenderman leaves off. Retaining a charming lo-fi, unvarnished quality with songwriting and structure reminiscent of Jason Molina or David Berman, Lenderman established and cemented an ethos that had already been brewing since 2018’s collaborative EP with bootgaze heavyweights Wednesday, a band Lenderman has also been playing in for the lion’s share of the 2020s.
There’s no way to separate this decade’s echelon of ‘indie’ music from MJ Lenderman. Alongside Wednesday, whose inimitable 2021 (Twin Plagues) and 2023 (Rat Saw God) albums Lenderman plays on, his distinctive guitar and vocals also graced much of Waxahatchee’s most recent album, Tiger’s Blood, including but not limited to one of the greatest songs of all time, ‘Right Back to It.’ The burgeoning intersection between the heavier, shoegaze-inflected side of music and the alt-country zeitgeist may have its epicenter in Asheville, North Carolina, but its reach encroaches far beyond the insular-ish confines thereof (see: Burlington, Vermont’s Greg Freeman and Chicago, Illinois’ Squirrel Flower, among many others). Lenderman and his associates are not just stupendous handlers of the craft of song, they’re also cultural instigators.
Lenderman’s songwriting has long been tongue-in-cheek, doling out lines like ‘jackass is funny / like the world is round’ in one of the most profound indie rock songs about devotion of all time (2022’s ‘You are Every Girl to Me’). The album from which that line originates, 2022’s Boat Songs, proved an unlikely breakout for the Asheville upstart. Undeniably incredible, it didn’t mark a drastic shift from Lenderman’s extant catalog. Retaining the off-kilter aspect of his earlier works, Boat Songs simply honed the sardonic and warbled quality which was by then a hallmark of the MJ Lenderman oeuvre. Since then, he’s been touring both under his own initials and with Wednesday, consistently releasing singles and a spectacular live album, announcing a signing with Los Angeles’ ANTI- Records and ameliorating the already-solid foundation he’d spent the past four years building.
When, earlier this year, his ANTI-debut and fourth full-length Manning Fireworks was announced, the world was primed for it. The groundswell Lenderman had built paid off in a big way. Immediate, expansive media coverage ensued, and with every successive single his audience seemed to climb meteorically. Manning Fireworks is a much less improbable mainstream-reaching album. It leaves behind the crackling atmosphere of a bedroom tape machine or the raucous, feedback-laden buzz of a live recording for the nigh-on sterile environment of a recording studio. Manning Fireworks expands not only forwards, in fidelity, but outwards, in arrangements. The record sees the continued presence of Xandy Chelmis’ pedal steel, alongside newfound string arrangements, woodwinds, and brass horns that not only buoy but infiltrate the songwriting of the record (read: “Clarinet / Singing its lonesome duck walk” from standout ‘You Don’t Know the Shape I’m In,’ a demo thereof originally appearing on the Through the Soil II Compilation). Sonically, sure, this is an undeniable progression, but it’s more than that. Lenderman’s most distinctive and, truly, most compelling moments have always lain within his relationship to the written word. His lyrics have often smudged the line between sarcastic and genuine, but on Manning Fireworks he seems to approach his notebook with an open heart. The earnestness with which Lenderman writes on the record doesn’t usurp his wit, per se, but rather allows the emotions endemic to his writing to stand in the forefront. In allowing himself the vulnerability of pain without needing to mask it in irony or (mostly) referentialism, Lenderman proves himself capable of maturing. On songs like ‘She’s Leaving You’ and ‘On My Knees,’ he takes on both roles in a pitying/piteous dyad, refusing to divert attention from the bare truths of his own mistakes.
While this record sees itself more wrapped in bombast than laden in cassette warmth, it also finds Lenderman paring back. The eponymous opener, along with arguably the album’s best track ‘Rip Torn,’ is spare, acoustic numbers whose spacious arrangements hold the space for Lenderman’s deft introspection to hold his audience’s attention without an escape hatch. More intimate, these songs are a rare practice in restraint in a catalog so frequently drenched in distortion. The other side of this coin, however, is the closing six-or-so minutes of the album, a descent from ‘Bark at The Moon’s’ spectacular subduction zone into a fuzzy drone piece, reminiscent of projects like Earth or SunnO)).
Manning Fireworks is, at its best, an exercise in reinvention without the often-inseparable concubine of the compromising of integrity. At its worst? It’s just another MJ Lenderman album.
Review by Walker Price
