In an MJ Lenderman music, the extraordinary is at all times elbowing its means into the mundane. His 2022 breakthrough album, Boat Songs, thrived on these conditions. One minute somebody was clinically depressed on the Six Flags log flume, the following they had been locked in a spat a couple of “dumb hat” outdoors a butcher store. “Being actually unhappy or upset whereas sporting a dressing up,” he advised Pitchfork final 12 months, “that’s humorous.” Over the past couple of years—as he signed with Anti- and remained a guitarist and songwriter within the nice Southern indie rock band Wednesday, alongside his now ex-partner Karly Hartzman—Lenderman grew to become a cult people hero for folks prepared to speak about their emotions if they might sofa it in a joke about Jackass.
I had initially clocked Manning Fireworks as extra of the identical, the place Lenderman depends on this one bizarre trick to put in writing honest however finally unserious songs. I used to be fallacious. Lenderman has honed his songwriting such that I’d nominate a couplet for brief story of the 12 months: “Kahlúa shooter/DUI scooter.” He’s acquired traces that’ll paint a silly grin in your face: “I may actually use your two cents, babe/I may actually use the change,” or, “Is it the quiet hiss of a midnight piss/Or a river turned to creek?” If his folk-rock forebears, like Neil Younger and Jason Molina, had been drawn to the mystics of the pure world, Lenderman is drawn to the mystics of the shitty condo, easy and unvarnished songs born of small screens in small rooms in small cities.
His writing model conjures the darkish, dry wit of Warren Zevon. The boys who populate Lenderman and Zevon’s songs are pure losers, divorcés, badgering or self-effacing romantics engaged on their last-ever heartbreak. Each artists additionally know learn how to open a music with a zinger: “Nicely I can noticed a lady in two/However you gained’t wanna look within the field when I’m via,” Zevon as soon as sang. It’s such a Lenderman line, particularly if you happen to think about him singing it at half the velocity Zevon does. “Burdened by these moist desires/Of individuals having enjoyable,” opens Lenderman, staring into the center distance on the mid-tempo rocker “On My Knees.” That is, thoughts you, the second time he’s sung about cum on Manning Fireworks.
Actually, it’s unfair to say that Lenderman writes about cum and piss and cartoons and video video games. He does, however it’s the model and financial system during which he renders them, as if he’s brushing them in gold leaf. “Rudolph” opens with this: