Guest Column: Healthy skepticism versus undeniable enjoyment: MJ Lenderman's "Manning Fireworks" by Nick Prevenas
Sound Tucson's own contributes.
For the first guest column of the new Never News era we’ve got Sound Tucson author Nick Prevenas. I can barely think of a more perfect introduction to guest columns: Nick was around during the first Never News era.
I hate it when the computer knows what I like.
Every aspect of modern life is dictated by The Algorithm, or The Algo, if you want to get adorably dystopian about it. The Algo knows what you want to see, hear, and feel often before you do. Every social media app and online audio/visual platform has been keeping tabs on you for the past couple decades and has turned your taste into a ruthlessly efficient commerce tool. It was always heading this way. Most people prefer it, if we're being completely honest. Why work to discover something new when your app of choice already has a "discover" option? Why take a risk on something bad/weird/challenging when you've already told The Algo everything?
Me? I still like taking chances. I like feeling like I made the discovery on my own, even if that feeling is harder and harder to come by organically.
Occasionally, though, something will get caught up in my radar that feels as though it was recorded and released specifically for me. The guitar sound and the slack mf'er lyrics will transport me back in time to the early 2000s, during that Napster-fueled broadband-internet deluge of new music discovery, when entire Pavement/Guided By Voices/Superchunk/etc catalogs were a click away. I turned my iPod into a library on the history of indie rock from my dorm room in Laramie, Wyoming (not a traditional Merge/Matador hotbed).
MJ Lenderman: Are you The Algo?
I listened to Bandsplain's end-of-2024 wrap-up episode, where host Yasi Salek and guests Rob Harvilla and Justin Sayles discussed their favorite records of last year. The hosts and I share similar tastes. I bet if you're reading music blogs on the internet, your taste overlaps with ours, as well. Harvilla – my favorite music critic and host of another music podcast we all like called "60 Songs That Explain the 90s" and its sequel show "60 Songs That Explain the 90s: The 2000s" – spoke about MJ Lenderman with a healthy dose of skepticism and suspicion. It's a good impulse. Interrogating one's taste is the surest way to defeat The Algo and to maintain the all-important element of surprise when listening to music, watching film, reading literature, or, well, living life.
Even after interrogation, however, I have come to the conclusion that "Manning Fireworks" is extremely my shit.
I can't help it.
You're only 25, MJ Lenderman. You turn 26 in a month – I looked it up [editor’s note: at time of writing]. I'm 42. You play the kind of music I always dreamed of playing. Your songs sound like how my songs sound in
my head, only crisper, funnier. You play guitar the way I play it, except sharper, more melodic. Your music is my music, except better.
I've admired Lenderman's guitar playing through those fantastic Wednesday albums, particularly his hard-charging riffage on "Chosen To Deserve." But that is only half of the Lenderman equation. His command of simple song structure, along with his mastery of Malkmus-ian turns of phrase, made "Manning Fireworks" my favorite record of 2024, despite how obvious it is for me to like this.
Lenderman strikes this perfect balance between jokey and sincerity in his lyrics. One degree further toward jokiness and the record falls apart – it would be this too-cute-by-half collection of extremely self-satisfied material. Yet one degree further toward sincerity and it would be this mawkish, self-pitying navel-gazey mess. This is an impossible needle to thread, but Lenderman threads it. It's the steady hand possible only after two ice-cold Miller High Lifes.
My favorite pre-"Manning Fireworks" Lenderman track is called "Hangover Game" – a humorous ode to Michael Jordan's alleged "flu game" when he almost single-handedly defeated the Utah Jazz in Game 5 of the 1997 NBA Finals despite suffering through flu-like symptoms. Lenderman (almost definitely correctly) calls bullshit on this myth, asserting that Jordan was not sick but instead completely hung over. It's a funny song until Lenderman hits the line "I like drinking too." It then pivots on a dime into being a song about recognition – we've all suffered through a few hangover games of our own, but rarely delivered incredible performances on the biggest possible stages.
Lenderman explains his formula on "Joker Lips" – please don't laugh, only half of what I said was a joke.
Side A of "Manning Fireworks" is wall-to-wall bangers. Each side of this record starts with a ramshackle Uncle Tupelo style country song that sounds like split wood on a worn-out porch. Side A's "Manning Fireworks" sets the syllabus, but it's the cumulative effect of "Joker Lips" into "Rudolph" into "Wristwatch" into "She's Leaving You" that show Lenderman and his band at full strength. They don't miss.
Side B's "Rip Torn" has a fiddle that sounds like it's falling apart and has the meme-able milkshakes/smoothies moments. It segues into the record's only weak spot – the wobbly clarinet that drives "You Don't Know the Shape I'm In." It's a fine song with a sticky melody, but it's at this point in the record that I'm worried that Lenderman only had an EP's worth of material (that Side A onslaught) and is now into the filler portion.
"On My Knees" is the most important song on this album. Just when we think we've heard all of Lenderman's moves and we think he might be running out of steam, he hits us with "What's the Frequency, Kenneth?" guitar stomp and this goosebump-inducing falsetto on the chorus. Whatever doubts I might've had about this guy, this record, The Algo – it's gone the second he sings "Is it the TV static of a distant crowd or maybe just the breeze?" It's on the word "breeze" when his voice cracks into that falsetto.
Every ounce of skepticism I might try to muster floats away on this breeze.
Lenderman ends the record with a song about playing "Bark at the Moon" on Guitar Hero and letting the guitars feed back for six or so minutes, almost like an indie movie that's 78 minutes long but needs six minutes of credits to earn theatrical distribution.
"Manning Fireworks" is not a reinvention or an interrogation or a recontextualization of anything. It's just a damn good guitar rock album that speaks exactly to the pleasure centers of my brain. I promise to spend most of 2025 challenging and interrogating, but I'm asking for only another half hour to spin this record again.