MJ Lenderman – ‘Manning Fireworks’ review: literary magic from Americana’s golden boy

5 September, 2024

MJ Lenderman photographed in black and white, photo by Charlie Boss

North Carolina native MJ Lenderman is Americana’s golden boy right now. He’s the lead guitarist of the country-rock band Wednesday, who saw widespread acclaim when they put out the excellent album ‘Rat Saw God’ last year, and he popped up as an impactful sideman on the equally brilliant Waxahatchee album ‘Tigers Blood’ early this year. It’s the 25-year-old’s three albums of work as a solo artist, though, that have generated the most intrigue. He writes alt-country songs that are both sorrowful and hilarious and sings them with a sort of warbling drawl reminiscent of Neil Young or Jason Molina.

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Lenderman’s breakthrough album, 2022’s ‘Boat Songs’, was raucous and grubby, its slackerist charm bolstered by its references to WWE wrestling and Michael Jordan. Its follow-up ‘Manning Fireworks’, while still irreverent — there’s a memorable line about “Lightning McQueen blacking out at full speed” — is more focused and literary, tightly packed with a deep-sown sadness. It’s an album of character sketches, and most of them are men who are stuck and pathetic, architects of their own loneliness. Lenderman is scathing in his birds-eye views of these men’s lives: “Some have passion, some have purpose / You have sneaking backstage to hound the girls in the circus,” he sings on the title track.

Yet these songs are deceptively empathetic. While they might have a laugh at the expense of the divorcé who obediently fulfils every midlife crisis cliché in ‘She’s Leaving You’, or the kid who begs his more worldly girlfriend not to leave him behind while he stays in his room playing video games in ‘Bark At the Moon’, Lenderman also nudges us to feel for them. Part of this comes from his lyrical dexterity. He can surprise you with a heartbreaking line, like when the protagonist of ‘Joker Lips’ sings, “You know I love my TV / But all I really wanna see is see you need me”. And doesn’t the title track’s simple observation, “You once was a baby, and now you’re a jerk,” encapsulate the tragedy of every asshole that’s ever lived?

Yet a lot of this interiority, too, comes from complexities painted musically by Lenderman’s guitar or Wednesday bandmate Xandy Chelmis’ pedal steel. Take the song ‘Wristwatch,’ for example, where the narrator insists he hasn’t wasted his life, isn’t all alone, by way of boasting about his beach home in Buffalo and his cool-guy smart-watch. The guitar on this song is gruff and in-your-face, but behind it, like an echo, sits the doleful pedal steel. Right after he delivers his bravado-laden line about the wristwatch “that’s a compass and a cell phone,” the pedal steel cries out; he’s given away. ‘Manning Fireworks’ is an album that aches for its cast of freaks and losers, and its success in walking that line is a sign of MJ Lenderman’s richly developing voice.