MJ Lenderman's "Manning Fireworks"

Half jokes and quarter smiles

With his 2024 release “Manning Fireworks,” alt-country-rock-ish artist MJ Lenderman paints portraits and vignettes of characters both pathetic and vicious through lines equal-parts witty and sincere.  

On his fourth studio album, Lenderman takes note of the tired Southern stereotypes illustrated in the typical country song – men obsessed with living simple and religious, brazenly beer drunk alone, wondering where their lost love went – and both satirizes and humanizes them as individuals. For the songs’ subjects, simplicity is loneliness, drinking is a crutch, and religion is a reminder of what could’ve been.  

The record is set to the tone of twangy alt-country guitars and the occasional country-gaze influence, complete with pleasant sonic surprises sprinkled throughout. If that doesn’t sound appealing, try and imagine the carcass that is country music with a breath of fresh air blown into it – but maybe, to you, that still just sounds like the description of a bloated corpse.  

Regardless of whether country licks lie within your taste or not, Lenderman’s writing is worth giving the record a fair shot – his veiled sarcasm and earnestness combine to create moments both comical and concerning. When Lenderman on “Joker Lips” says, “Please don’t laugh, only half of what I said was a joke,” he really means it.  

In “On My Knees,” Lenderman illustrates someone who cannot sleep due to his fears of having a bad dream or having one so good that it makes his life even more crushing. Before staying up all night, he turns to his ark – alcohol – for comfort through the night.  

Over warm and gritty strings, Lenderman sings in a double entendre, “In the dark I consider my ark (arc) / out the window, the bushes shake.” Here, Lenderman employs his wit to outline the scariness of the world and the comfort of alcohol, while also painting the song’s subject as already drunk, taking a leak through the window and onto the shrubbery outside.  

It’s probably my favorite line on the whole record because it speaks to not only the disconcerting laughingstocks of the songs’ cast, but also the cleverness of Lenderman’s writing. It’s lonely, worrying, absurd, borderline slapstick, and it’s all shot through a shrug and a smirk.  

He does it again and again throughout the album, biting his tongue while also being tongue-in-cheek. On “Bark At The Moon,” he shrugs in conversation with a former lover, “I took off on a bender / You took off on a jet / You’re in on my bit / You’re sick of the schtick / Well, what did you expect?” 

Here, he reduces himself to something lowly while his ex looms above him, fully understanding his jokes but annoyed by their consistent mockery – to which he follows up with a side eye and a chuckle as if to turn his palms and say, “What could I even do about it in the first place.”  

With every listen of the album, I take note of how genuine the subjects seem, and how easily Lenderman is able to both paint them and poke fun at them. From my listening, I’m partial to the idea that the subjects all come from a place of personal investment and experience. 

Should it be so, “Manning Fireworks” works on a separate, even more hidden level as a purge of grievances and struggles presented as a self-deprecating joke. 

When on hit song “Wristwatch,” after bragging about equally useless and pointless frivolities and the versatility of his ultimately boring watch, the song’s subject looks at his wrist only for it to tell him he’s all alone.  

The song stands as a ballad of burying yourself in embellishments to cover up your own shame and disappointment, and it cuts. It cuts in such a real way that it’s hard to not feel as though Lenderman is characterizing his own flaws to make fun of them.  

Not too far and away are the opening lines to the title track “Manning Fireworks,” where Lenderman sings, “Birds against a heavy wind that wins in the end / One of these days, with shorts full of sand.”  

They’re illustrations of people meant to be free, whether that be flying in the air or floating on the sea, only to be thrown back to the earth. The bird falls from the sky in a violent but almost valiant way, and the man is spit from the ocean in a humiliating fashion.  

It shows that, to Lenderman, it’s all a bit of a joke. That no matter how, we’ll all be brought back down, because that is our nature.  

To close out the album, “Bark At The Moon,” rips one of the best guitar solos with the best melodies in the album’s playtime and promptly drops into a six-and-a-half-minute wall of noise soundscape – one final sly move from Lenderman. Instead of one last bang or a grand finale for “Manning Fireworks,” Lenderman lets it slowly burn itself out – like a long, useless fuse – and makes you imagine the punchline this time.  

By the time the credits roll, the only question we’re left to answer is the same one posed through a quarter smile in that same final track – “Well, what did you expect?”