Album review: MJ Lenderman proves himself a premier songwriter with ‘Manning Fireworks’

In the music video accompanying his song “She’s Leaving You,” singer-songwriter MJ Lenderman appears both out of place and unwelcome. He’s playing to an audience populated by bored kids with nose rings and jeering, trucker-hat-sporting countryfolk at “Bobby Barry’s Talent Show,” the video’s garish main event that most would be hopeless to endure sober.

Contrasting his distinctly Gen Z crowd, Lenderman’s tune sounds like a lost gem from ’90s college rock radio for its simple, yet emotionally potent, guitar riff and hooky rhythm. Only, this Asheville-born-and-raised musician’s untamed accent and wiry vocal intonations recall those of alt-country great Jason Molina more than any foremost grunge or slack rockers. This is an artist you just can’t pin down.

With such broad influences guiding his work, Lenderman has developed a sound that is both delightfully timeless and fiercely his own.

On “Manning Fireworks,” Lenderman’s Friday album release and debut studio effort on the label ANTI- , his songwriting is more polished and captivating than ever.

It’s the soundtrack to woozy, lonesome nights and mornings that seem to want to kill you. Waking up hungover and acutely miserable, memories of all the things you tried to forget the night before crashing around the contours of your brain, rubbing your eyes red and resigning to begin again.

“Manning Fireworks” largely reads as a breakup album. Several of the song titles alone — “She’s Leaving You,” “You Don’t Know the Shape I’m In” and “On My Knees” — point to abandonment and heartache. To say Lenderman juggles these crushing feelings gracefully would be inaccurate, but that makes him a much more compelling narrator.

Like so many, Lenderman attempts to dilute his pain through comedy. However, his sense of humor is so bleak and bizarre that it’s often hard to determine whether you should laugh or whether he’s telling a joke at all.

The bitingly pathetic scenes he narrates — to name a few, riding a “DUI scooter with a rolling start on the hill” on “Joker Lips,” staying “up too late with Guitar Hero” on album closer “Bark at the Moon” and sitting beside a partner “under a half-mast McDonald’s flag” on “You Don’t Know the Shape I’m In” — are so earnestly sung that before you have time to chuckle at their peculiarity, you’re wincing at their hyper-specificity and consequent emotional weight.

Even his most absurd vignettes — memorably, a “blacked out” Lightning McQueen runs over the titular reindeer of “Rudolph” — are imbued with a haze of grief that cuts like a dull knife.

Famed writer T.S. Eliot claimed that by linking specific objects, situations and events, a poet can convey an exact, pointed emotion without explicitly describing it, a concept Lenderman has mastered both musically and lyrically.

Lenderman begs you not to ask how he’s doing on “Joker Lips,” his voice wavering as his pedal-steel guitar circulates an aura of emotional drainage, but he’s such a gifted storyteller that you never really have to ask to perceive the keen senses of exhaustion, dereliction and heartbreak left unsaid.

Take the Dinosaur Jr.-esque chorus on “Wristwatch,” in which his voice abruptly cuts itself off before the propulsive, one-of-several poignant moments where Lenderman seems to have nothing more to say to console himself.

For all its half-jokes and half-truths, much of the album’s emotional reach is through its simplicity. All it takes for Lenderman to elicit listeners’ empathy for an insecure “jerk” depicted on the folky title track is to remind us that he was “once a perfect little baby.”

He swiftly averts the potential to snicker, directing it at a character “passed out in a bowl of Lucky Charms” with a clear-cut, track-stopping lament — “luck doesn’t mean much” — on “Rip Torn,” a Southern Gothic ballad whose screeching, elegiac fiddle sounds as unsure of itself as its wretched protagonist.

Most grippingly direct of all is the lead single “She’s Leaving You,” arguably one of the best tracks of the year.

Lenderman’s “you” — likely himself — is as dejected as he appears in the video. “You can put your clothes back on; she’s leaving you,” Lenderman bluntly opens the track in media res. Its magnetism and palpable anguish lie in its frankness; the driving chord progression is as devastatingly uncomplicated as the chorus’ central realization, “She’s leaving you.”

“Manning Fireworks” is sure to remind college-aged listeners of crisp and sunny fall days, emotionally seesawing between languid despondence and giddy hope, making comically stupid decisions and trying to figure out this grotesque, brutal yet beautiful world as a young adult.

But, if my face is found in a bowl of cereal decades from now — hopefully not in the literal sense — I know Lenderman will still be there, understanding and empathizing as few artists can.

Rating: 5/5