Under Control: MJ Lenderman's 'Manning Fireworks' Review
'Manning Fireworks' beautifully balances heartbreak and humour. It also makes you dream of the days where all you had was Guitar Hero and a desire to be a good person.
MJ Lenderman lumbers onto the stage like the robot from Studio Ghibli’s Castle in the Sky. He wears a Mississippi Wreckers t-shirt and what appears to be brand new Blundstone boots. You could be forgiven for thinking that he had just left his bedroom. He looks like a teenager who is about to play their first show - that’s if it wasn’t for the hundreds of people that have come out to see him tonight. Every time he lifts his head, he looks surprised by the fact that there are actually people in the room, so he keeps looking down, his foot moving awkwardly between guitar pedals, guitars roaring over a collection of slacker tales and funny anecdotes.
The crowd, including myself, shout every lyric to the songs off his third solo record, the deceivingly titled Boat Songs. After four tracks - having not lifted his head once - he opens his mouth and mumbles, ‘It’s weird, you seem to know all the words. Here’s a song you don’t know the words to.’ The band storm into the previously unreleased, ‘Wristwatch’. I’d now be surprised if fans at his concert don’t know the lyrics by heart.
Over the past year or so, Mark Jacob Lenderman has become the poster boy for the Pavement loving, lo-fi gobbling, lyrically sarcastic guitar obsessive who has been waiting for an unassuming rock hero since the death of Kurt Cobain. He has appeared in a variety of massive editorials who all describe him in platitudes such as ‘Southern Rock’s Tragicomic Poet’. If we take away anything from his music, this is exactly what Lenderman doesn’t want to be. He’s young, only 25. He doesn’t have the ferocious stage persona of Cobain, and he doesn’t imbue his songs with the same oddness as Pavement. His songs are sung casually and written simply, often using four chords (at a push) that are played using a guitar, bass and drums. There is nothing complicated about it, and yet, it feels strangely revelatory.
His music is the kind of stuff you wished to write alone in your room if you were ever a slightly gloomy teenager with an electric guitar and a dream of playing in front of a crowd, much like myself. Lenderman writes songs about relatively normal subjects. His world is filled with drinking, taking drugs, partying, bad sex, falling in love, falling out of love, crying at the party after being heartbroken, watching TV, Catholic guilt, and then drinking and crying at another party while dressed as a clown. All the while, he is making conversation with friends about Rudolph (yes, the reindeer), Michael Jordan’s food poisoning in Utah, TLC Cage matches, and buying expensive meat only to drop it on the ground. Lenderman can elevate a joke to a mantra, and with his fourth album, Manning Fireworks, the jokes and melodies come just as rapidly as they did before, but there is a sense that he is also trying to hold onto the things he loves most.
Lenderman’s songs grow in a similar vein to those of Big Thief’s Adrianne Lenker. They are so deceptively simple that on first pass they might come off as trite, or even lazy. Where Lenker draws from the country and folk storytelling abilities of John Prine and Leonard Cohen, Lenderman evokes the melodic acuity of Neil Young or Sparklehorse. His songs are so routed in traditional chord progressions and Americana that they feel preordained. But where Lenker’s lyrics wrap around her songs to create tongue twisting whirlpools of love and loss, Lenderman is economical in a way that can turn four words, like ‘Joker Lips’s’: “Kahlua shooter / DUI scooter”, into a story all of its own. What’s most striking is the deeper you delve into Manning Fireworks’ details, the casual lyrical ingenuity of each song morphs from quietly hysterical to deeply heart breaking in the space of a breath.
Growing up as an altar-boy, Lenderman’s Catholic guilt is on full display here. He bemoans that “Every Catholic knows he could’ve been pope”, while pleading that “I wouldn’t be in the seminary if I could be with you”. But rather than solely confront this cultural guilt, the album can easily be read as an open letter of culpability - to the church, to his friends, to his family, and to people he has let down.
As I was reading an early review of the album, I learned that Lenderman and his long time partner, Karly Hartzman (his co-band member in the equally incredible Wednesday), had recently broken up. It may be strange to say this about two people I don’t know, but I was heartbroken. I had seen Lenderman support Wednesday earlier this year, playing alongside his now ex-partner through these songs of shared experience. They would look at each other admiringly, let of sly jokes that only they knew. It felt real and true. But knowing that they were no longer together only makes the early singles off Manning Fireworks, including the melodically-flawless ‘She’s Leaving You’ and the brutally honest ‘Rip Torn’ all the more affecting. It also changes how we experience the album as a whole.
Lenderman’s perceptiveness on Manning Fireworks’ nine songs is at times disquieting. The beautiful shared harmonies with Hartzman turn these songs into minute confession boxes. You can easily perceive many of his songs as inside jokes. He tries to dispel this perception by pleading, without a care, “Please don’t laugh, only half of what I said / Was a joke”. However, this has to be taken with a grain of salt when it comes directly after the excruciating and darkly funny line:
Draining cum from hotel showers Hoping for the hours To pass a little faster
The grief that Lenderman has for failing the people around him similarly holds strange dichotomies. In ‘You Don’t Know the Shape I’m In’, Lenderman sings over a campfire style guitar and drum machine:
And you don’t know the shape I’m in Punching holes in a hotel room singing 'All you had to do was be nice, be nice, To me.'
The breath between the confession of self-improvement (be nice) and the change to a demand (to me) is disquieting. Like so many young men, Lenderman is trying to balance his desire to grow into a better person and his frustration that the world is against him or leaving him behind. He often lists these thoughts as if they are circling at an unwieldy pace in his head, as he does in ‘On My Knees’:
Burdened by those wet dreams of people having fun ‘Cause I know goin’ on vacation brings the worst out of everyone And every day is a miracle, not to mention a threat Of bee’s nests nestled in a hole in the yard Of Travolta’s bald head
The burden and the fun, the miracle and the threat. The lyrics reflect someone who is being pulled in wildly different directions, but instead of falling to pieces, he may as well make a joke out of the caricature of being a man in his mid-twenties trying to keep his head above water.
This level of openness could maybe feel oppressive if it wasn’t for the simple beauty of every melody on the record. Xandy Chelmis’ lap steel work gives the songs a warm and welcoming feel, while the rhythm section swings rather than pummels, letting Lenderman take centre stage. On ‘She’s Leaving You’, the shared vocal harmonies with Hartzman on the chorus feel as if the album was created as form of self-improvement. On the line: “It falls apart, we all got work to do”, you can’t help feel it being directed solely at Hartzman singing from the other side of the room.
These confessions reach an apex on the finale ‘Bark at the Moon’, an oddly joyous song about lives moving in two separate directions:
I’ve lost my sense of humour I’ve lost my driving range I could really use your two cents, babe, I could really use the change
As we come to the feedback drenched five minutes that are the cap-stone to the album, Lenderman ends by pointing the finger of blame squarely in his direction:
I took off on a bender, You took off on a jet You’re in on my bit, You’re sick of the schtick, Well, what did you expect I’ve never seen the Mona Lisa I’ve never really left my room I’ve been up too late with Guitar Hero Playing 'Bark at the Moon'
By returning to the place he feels most at home - playing guitar, alone, to the songs of his heroes - Lenderman finally finds peace. He doesn’t want to be the man in ‘Wristwatch’, with “a houseboat docked at the Himbo Dome” (maybe the funniest lyric to come out this year) and who has “a wristwatch that tells me I’m on my own”. As he explained in a recent piece for The New Yorker:
“I’m not interested in growing so much. I want to be financially stable as a musician but also have a second to chill and collect my thoughts. I guess I want to keep getting better.”
And with Manning Fireworks, he has taken what makes him so startlingly fresh and refined it enough for it to feel like a huge leap forward. To think of the time where he could barely look at the crowd as he roared through these songs that were written in a small room in Asheville - expecting no one to hear or listen. His music connects because he is relatable to anyone who dreamed of being able to play their silly little songs and have them connect with a variety of people.
The real reason I admire Lenderman so much is because I wished to be like him. I hoped to one day convert those days of jumping around a bedroom playing Guitar Hero into something that could be my life. His songs touch me because they sing to me about my own experiences, even though my life has no correlation to his upbringing in North Carolina. I wanted to be him, up on that stage, lanky and awkward, face to face with a crowd singing every single lyric to every one of my songs - songs that are raw, loud, and personal. But I’m not up there doing that, and MJ Lenderman is. He has become a reflection of what I wish for in a musician. A normal person who goes through life like the rest of us. I carefully listen to his music because it is truthful, flawed, funny, simple, and painfully human. Rarely do you come across a musician who just wants to be a regular person and who is happy that they get to do what they love. It now seems many more people are feeling that same connection, and despite what Lenderman would have you believe, his music deserves it.
