Review: MJ Lenderman – Manning Fireworks

MJ Lenderman
Manning Fireworks
Anti-
Street: 09.06
MJ Lenderman = Pavement + Drive-By Truckers

Though only 25, Mark Jacob Lenderman has already gotten around. He’s played guitar for Wednesday on all three of their albums, drums for fellow Asheville, North Carolina artist Indigo De Souza on her albums I Love My Mom and Any Shape You Take and a bit of everything on Waxahatchee’s Tiger’s Blood. Now, with, Manning Fireworks, Lenderman now has four full-length solo albums under his belt, too. In that short time he’s crafted himself into indie-rock’s newest heartbreak kid with the right balance of crass self-aware humor to give every tear a laugh to match. 

Lenderman’s blend of folk and strong classic rock influences (as well as references) creates scenes of aimless Mideastern losers and is perhaps at its strongest on Manning Fireworks. His characters are ones we’ve known in our own lives, the recently heartbroken and directionless men who reach for anything to fill the void or give them purpose again—ones you have to pull aside and say, “Look man, I know she left, but you can’t keep doing this anymore.” Whether it’s the ones who’ve lost their potential, like in the first and title track of the album: “You once was a baby, and now a jerk / Standing close to the pyre, manning fireworks” or the ones who are so full of longing it keeps them from the rest of the world, like in “Joker Lips”: “Draining cum from hotel showers / Hoping for the hours to pass a little faster / Please don’t laugh, only half of what I said was a joke / Every Catholic knows he could’ve been Pope.” You’ll find a lot of folks you know throughout the nine-song album, and you’re likely to see a bit of yourself in them too. These scenes of rock bottom coping are a regular topic for Lenderman, but they prove his skill at capturing the feeling of melancholy, misery and dead-end bargaining often told in short and sparse verses. Lenderman has an incredible skill for efficiency and the casual and imprecise way he sings only adds to the authenticity of each song, as if he’s singing in a confession booth. 

Manning Fireworks is a stained-glass window made of crushed beer bottles to commemorate those who were abandoned by the world. The debut single “She’s Leaving You” features Lenderman’s previous bandmate and partner, Wednesday’s own Karly Hartzman. The final moments of the iconic breakup song ring out with: “It falls apart / We all got work to do / It gets dark / We all got work to do / She’s leaving you.” It’s the type of tough love, “What makes you so special?” advice that you’d get from a friend who’s sick of putting up with your whimpering. “She’s Leaving You” is a great blueprint for what makes Lenderman’s song writing so appealing: a strong guitar lead intro, a moment for the drums to kick in, a few short verses of highly descriptive (if not cryptic) lyrics, a big break for a winding and throttling guitar solo and maybe an outro if you’re lucky. This is the formula present on almost every song on the album, which can (at times) feel like he’s lingering a bit too much in each wild guitar breakdown. This is the same criticism I have for Lendeman’s breakout single “Knockin,” which—while building up to an incredible chorus—seems to trail off to a very skilled though overindulgent guitar solo that lasts about half of the song’s total length. Thankfully for Manning Fireworks, there are only a few times on this project that felt the same. 

One of Lenderman’s signature songwriting traits is his direct references to rock legends through out the album. And while other songwriters may try to disguise some references through metaphor, Lenderman often will pull a whole lyric. In “Rudolph,” he takes Bob Dylan’s iconic chorus from “Blowin In The Wind,” though with his own twist: “How many roads must a man / Walk down till he learns.” He does the same on the following song “Wristwatch” with the first line coming from Quiet Riot’s “Cum On Feel the Noize”: “So you say I got a funny face / It makes me money.” The final track, “Bark at the Moon,” mentions Ozzy Osbourne’s track of the same name and closes out with the iconic “A-wooooo” from Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London,” leaving us with  approximately seven minutes of fuzzed-out, melancholy guitars that would catch the attention of David Lynch, sending us off to bed in cum-stained sheets. –wphughes

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