He’s a budding guitar great and an ace storyteller
Over the past few years, Asheville, North Carolina, singer-songwriter MJ Lenderman has become every indie-rock fan’s favorite dude — the Craig Finn or Stephen Malkmus or Jeff Tweedy of the mid-2020s. He plays guitar in the great North Carolina band Wednesday, and in 2022, he put out the fantastic breakthrough solo set Boat Songs, piling offhanded, grimy noise on wry, laconic bangers and moaners like “Hangover Game” and “Tastes Just Like It Costs.” This year Lenderman lent sweet playing and vocals to Waxahatchee’s excellent Tiger’s Blood.
He’s really feeling himself on his new Manning Fireworks, leaning into the country side of his songwriting and the collapsing-back- porch ache in his voice — from the fiddle-scoured title track to the Drive-By-Truckers-style roots rock of “On My Knees” to the woodsy prettiness of the Band-referencing “You Don’t Know the Shape I’m In.” Manning Fireworks is a more conventional singer-songwriter album than Boat Songs, not as loud or as funny. But it shows Lenderman further carving out his unique space as a budding master of downmarket realism. The highlight is the beautifully shabby rocker “She’s Leaving You,” one of several songs that get lit up by backing vocals from Wednesday’s Karly Hartzman. Lenderman sings about a guy who wakes to find his woman long gone, but there’s no emotional growth to be had here: “Go rent a Ferrari/And sing the blues/Believe that Clapton was the second coming,” he sings before the big chorus hits.
Hapless, emotionally stunted men like that show up in pretty much every song here, and he tells their stories with homespun irony and droll empathy. On “Wristwatch,” he goes from dumpy brags (“I got a beach home up in Buffalo”) to vague menace (“and a wristwatch that tells me you’re all alone”). On the 10-minute closer, “Bark at the Moon,” the guy in the song is deep in his room playing the titular Ozzy Osbourne classic on Guitar Hero as the world leaves him behind. Great poets of sad-sackery, from Loudon Wainwright III to Paul Westerberg to Neil Young, come to mind on Manning Fireworks. Lenderman takes that vaunted rock tradition and spins it into something of his own. In these songs, life is only getting darker, drunker, and more desperate. In terms of the music, that’s a good thing.
