MJ Lenderman “Manning Fireworks”

Raw, ragged, and irreverent.

Five years ago, MJ Lenderman was scooping ice cream in his hometown of Asheville. Since then, his career has skyrocketed, and his songs, laced with a humour older than his years, balance raw despair with wry amusement. A brief listen to the opening and title track of his fifth album, ‘Manning Fireworks’, makes the hype clear. It’s an exquisite, freewheeling acoustic number, where Lenderman muses on the futility of life, addressing someone who was “once a perfect little baby” but is “now a jerk.” There’s a febrile energy of ditch-era Neil Young, paired with the haunted drawl of Jason Molina.

The single ‘Joker Lips‘ continues the unraveling. Bright yet bleary guitar lines back the narrator’s plea, “please don’t ask how I’m doing,” followed by a pithy summation of his state: “draining cum from hotel showers.” It’s an album of beer-can blues, filled with losers with nothing left to lose, sketched lightly over scenes of Small-town Americana- water parks, dead-end jobs, McDonald’s parking lots, and TV love.

‘Rip Torn‘ is a beautiful, torn and frayed elegy, with Lenderman offering advice to someone “passed out in your Lucky Charms,” telling them, “you need to drink some water, it’ll kill the urge to puke.” While the music is rooted in classic rock, it’s not entirely reverent. Lenderman weighs his boomer and Gen X influences with a kind of hygienic distance. Many of these songs sketch a particular “divorced dadcore” energy—dad here ending up drunk on his grown son’s sofa bed, haunted by a life of regrets.

In ‘Wristwatch,’ the narrator has “a beach home in Buffalo and a wristwatch that’s a compass and a cell phone,” but by the end, the wristwatch just “tells me I’m on my own.” And in ‘She’s Leaving You,’ he advises, “Go rent a Ferrari and sing the blues / Believe Clapton was the second coming of the blues.”

Musically, it’s urgent and ragged, both heavy and soft, tight and loose, always teetering on the edge of falling apart. ‘You Don’t Know the Shape I’m In’ has lo-fi bedroom beats, matched with a warbling clarinet, invoking recent Bonnie “Prince” Billy experiments. Lenderman curates his own world—aloof but alive. But beneath all the sardonic humour, there’s a heart in there, wrapped up in the struggle.