Scuzz, begone! The scuzz is dead. Xandy, I told you to step away from the pedal steel. Alan! Sorry, Colin! Stop chewing the wire. Cut the distortion, let’s take this overdrive off my pedalboard.

This is the proclamation MJ Lenderman seems to make on his fourth solo album, Manning Fireworks. For context: in 2022, Lenderman released Boat Songs, a tight little 30-minute Southern rock album that burst with hilariously mundane song concepts and brought Lenderman critical fervour and fan worship. It was sentimental, too, in its wry examination of various touchstones of dude culture – the NBA, WWE, expensive meat, boats. And it was scuzzy. Boat Songs sounded like outlaw country by way of noisy 90s indie rock, and the granules of electrified fuzz that littered the sound field of the album’s more charged-up tracks made the whole thing feel fucking awesome. It’s the scuzz that makes the titular refrain of ‘Tastes Just Like It Costs’ sound like liberation; the scuzz that makes “catchin’ up on my TV” feel like high drama. But that scuzz is barely anywhere to be found on Manning Fireworks. Lenderman opts for a cleaner guitar tone, and the album is produced dryly to match – the drums are sharp and taut, the vocals are closely mic’d, there’s even space for a clarinet in the mix. Finally, Jake’s narrator can be clearly heard.

The effect of that proclamation is that in the space of just two years, Lenderman’s songwriting – which had already reached full maturity with the release of Boat Songs – has undergone a tonal transformation. Where Boat Songs was unflappably cool, Manning Fireworks is truly, roundly pathetic.

And it’s staring up at you from your charcoal phone screen in that shitty Spotify font. Those track titles: ‘Joker Lips’, ‘She’s Leaving You’, ‘You Don’t Know The Shape I’m In’, ‘On My Knees’ among them. You can tell from the outset what Lenderman’s going for. Manning Fireworks presents a catalogue of men in various stages of embarrassment. Sometimes it’s clear that these men are worthy victims of their own demise, which leads to music that takes on the brilliant ridiculousness of its character. Sometimes the ordinariness of their plight, the way they let themselves down so naively and unremarkably, makes the music acutely affecting. On a few occasions, Lenderman manages to capture both these qualities in the span of a single song.

Take ‘Manning Fireworks’, the album’s opener. Over fingerpicked guitar out of the John Prine playbook, Lenderman’s first words sketch the kind of plainly poetic image most folk songwriters work their whole lives to never improve upon: “Birds against a heavy wind that wins in the end”. The desperate beauty of that line is like a thesis statement for the album, if you’re empathetic enough to imagine Lenderman’s jerks and cowards as flailing birds in flight. But he doesn’t examine the scene any further, he just lets the small drama of it colour the rest of the song. As the music morphs into a slow-burning country waltz, Lenderman rolls out a deadpan character study of probably the biggest piece of work the album has to offer. “Some have passion, some have purpose / you have sneakin’ backstage to hound the girls in the circus”. It’s a little like Randy Newman’s ‘Old Man’ – funny, blunt, and worn down by shame. At one point, Lenderman invokes the intrinsically hilarious logic of LeFirstPage to describe his protagonist’s most hopeless seduction technique.

As an artist, Lenderman’s foundational appeal is his watertight songcraft – the combination of his compelling yet unshowy vocals and guitarwork, his intuitive grasp of harmony and timing, and the songwriting chops that could have held court in any era of rock music. And it’s true that some of his most memorable couplets on Manning Fireworks have the universal charm of a Neil Young or a David Berman lyric, like when he barks “every day is a miracle / not to mention a threat” on ‘On My Knees’, or confesses “it falls apart / we all got work to do” over the wailing guitars of ‘She’s Leaving You’. But it’s the intersection of the classic and contemporary where the subtle flair of Lenderman’s writing really comes to the fore. ‘Joker Lips’ reaches its comic peak when the modern-day parable “Kahlua shooter / DUI scooter” leads to a resolution that might have been devastating in the hands of Townes Van Zandt in the 70s – “this morning wants to kill me”. Later, on the crunching highlight ‘Wristwatch’, a sleazy narrator laughs off a claim that he’s wasted his life away, only to look down at his useless Apple Watch and reconsider.

Manning Fireworks is a signal that Lenderman as a songwriter is far more interested in the question of ‘how’ than ‘what’. Many of the album’s songs deal in surprisingly vague subject matter, but that realisation took days to dawn on me because each track is so richly satisfying in its construction. The breakup at the core of ‘You Don’t Know The Shape I’m In’ is actually quite a banal one, but Lenderman’s careful details sound genuinely forlorn, like his wry observation of sitting “under a half-mast McDonald’s flag”, or the way the wah effect on his guitar mimics a pounding headache as he sighs the song’s hook. ‘Bark At The Moon’ chronicles another breakup, but its spritely folk-rock sound and dry humour convey an unlikely stoicism on the part of its narrator. Lenderman’s final words here are my favourite on the whole record: “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’”. He lets out a canine howl, gets swallowed up by gorgeous duelling guitars, and the album draws to its close… with six minutes of raw, ambient drone. It's symbolic. You don’t always get the ending you expect, but you hope you caught some lightning in a bottle while it happened.

87

Sam Gollings

18 September 2024