Though MJ Lenderman’s latest record gives one the sensation that he was born centuries ago, guitar in hand, and has been cranking out the indie-rock bangers for, well, ever, Manning Fireworks feels like it took ages to drop. Perhaps we’d been waiting since the appearance of “Rudolph” as a stand-alone Manning Fireworks single back in July 2023, before he’d even announced Live and Loose, a full-length live album he’d put out that November. In other ways, we’ve been waiting since Rat Saw God, the April 2023 release with his band Wednesday, on which he and ex-girlfriend Karly Hartzman made, of the many attempts that year, the closest thing to a satisfying slacker-rock-revival record.
But for all intents and purposes, let’s say we’ve only been waiting since he dropped the blisteringly cool “She’s Leaving You,” almost a full year post-“Rudolph,” and announced that he would put out his fourth full-length solo project in the coming months. In the time between “She’s Leaving You” and the forthcoming Manning Fireworks (read: Jun. 24 until Sep. 6), approximately three years’ worth of Lenderman press was published. If it wasn’t odd enough, Lenderman’s release cycle was made even stranger by a critical bottled lightning of sort: all everyone had to say was that the guy was fucking brilliant. Which, while likely true, made for a repetitive story. Couple this with the fact that Lenderman, a 25-year-old rock singer from North Carolina, is just as normal as you might imagine him to be, and suddenly you’ve got the everyman thinking he’s indie rock’s unlikely savior. Lenderman’s denial of this position only strengthens it. Of course, he doesn’t think he’s saving rock and roll, not in the jeans-and-a-t-shirt uniform that every interviewer and their mother has felt compelled to include in their portrait.
If not a redeemer, then what is MJ Lenderman? He’s not country-rock revival á la Zach Bryan—he toes the line between earnestness and disaffect too adeptly. He’s got that David Berman-esque way of looking at the world like he’s watching it on a TV screen. He’s having a coke with you. He writes with his finger on the pulse as tight as I’ve seen since Isaac Woods was still writing for Black Country, New Road (Lenderman, though, is importantly all-American, though one can’t help but to read at least a touch of British sensibility into the blackness of his humo(u)r.). But perhaps the closest thing I can find to an MJ Lenderman lyric isn’t a Berman or Molina-ism, not even Neil Young or The Band’s approach to ordinariness, but something from a little 1994 album called Little Earthquakes. Tori Amos sings, “I want to smash the faces / of those beautiful boys / those Christian boys / so you can make me cum / That doesn’t make you Jesus.” I can hear her explaining the line with, please don’t laugh only half of what I said was a joke—a lyric from Lenderman single “Joker Lips,” maybe the album’s cleverest cut, and the container of already oft-invoked coupling “Kahlúa shooter/DUI scooter.” For what it’s worth, I prefer “Every Catholic knows he could’ve been Pope.”
Henri Lefebvre writes, in his The Everyday and Everydayness, “The everyday is the most universal and the most unique condition, the most social and the most individuated, the most obvious and the best hidden…” It’s impossible not to hear Manning Fireworks as some twisted celebration of the everyday: take the endlessly clever “On My Knees” that marshals Noah’s Ark against John Travolta’s bald head. It’s a rock song, no modifiers of indie or alternative or country necessary. It’s an everyday rock song, and one that lands on the everyday as its subject. Whether he’s sat in the pews or just waking from a wet dream, Lenderman is on his knees. He’s not afraid to admit that he’s begging.
Perhaps it is the everydayness of Lenderman’s lyrics that makes them feel so intimate, or maybe it’s the tightness—of both his wordplay and his songwriting. Lenderman can riff fast and hard, and I emphasize the double entendre there. See how many times you hear that dun-dun-dun-dun-dun opener to “She’s Leaving You” echo through the rest of the tracklist. I promise it will keep popping up in the most satisfying interstices.
Either way, Lefebvre seems to be right. Manning Fireworks becomes my own unique condition, my everyday. I am thirteen years old and in the car with my mom. It’s dark and warm and we should probably be driving to a hospital. My chest is black and blue from the pounding of my own fist. The car ends up in the parking lot of the Holy Child Church, and we sit silent for a long while before it drives home. I am in my apartment listening to the acoustic, The Band-inspired “You Don’t Know The Shape I’m In.” I’m under a half-mast McDonald’s flag. I’m half-mast under the open sky of time, and I don’t know whether to turn back or forward. “Some people cry out against the acceleration of time,” Lefebvre writes, “Others cry out against stagnation. They’re both right.” Only half of what I said was a joke.
The record’s final track is utter inversion, and it devastates in a way that no one could possibly have anticipated. Where Lenderman earlier reminded us that at least half of what he said was a joke, he begins “Bark At The Moon” letting us know “I’ve lost my sense of humor” (the next line, “I lost my driving range,” as if the two perhaps got misplaced in the back of the same SUV. Doing it in some cul-de-sac, even). Lenderman becomes the most earnest in this moment of self-recognition. He faces his ironic detachment almost head-on—“You’re in on my bit / you’re sick of the schtick / well, what did you expect?” He’s right: he’s lost his sense of humor, even despite the fact that the song’s conceit is at least slightly funny in its own right. He’s playing Ozzy Osbourne’s “Bark At The Moon” on Guitar Hero. It’s a simulacrum almost to parody. There’s no guitar, no moon, no act of barking, in other words, no means of production, no object of desire, and no vocalization of that desire. Just hollowness. At last, Lenderman lets out perhaps the saddest-sounding wolf howl before the song, and therefore the album, nullifies itself into seven minutes of ambient guitar fuzz. Like he should’ve stopped the recording but he, just like his listener, became paralyzed with an ineffable vision of bleakness. The bit is over. Disaffect has been pushed to its absolute limit, and all it found was the auto-erasure of a distortion pedal. Oh MJ Lenderman we love you get up.
