On ‘37 Push Ups’, a track from Bill Callahan’s third album under the name Smog, the singer-songwriter writes from the perspective of a man who identifies with Travis Bickle – the Taxi Driver protagonist who has become an inspirational archetype for the modern-day “sigma male” – counting reps in a seaside motel as he listens to ‘Highway to Hell’ on a shitty tape. Julius Caesar was the first album Callahan recorded in a professional studio, though you couldn’t necessarily tell from its lo-fi approach. In an interview with The New York Times, MJ Lenderman describes the character as “a kind of blueprint” for the ones he tends to write about. Part of the fascination lies in the ways a certain brand of masculinity continues to permeate and contort itself through (popular) culture, three decades later: ‘Wristwatch’, a highlight from Lenderman’s phenomenal new album Manning Fireworks, can be read as a sketch of an Andrew Tate-type guy whose displays of wealth keep blowing up in his face, accentuating his own lonely despair. A reference to Slade’s ‘Cum on Feel the Noize’ drives the point home. “How many roads must a man walk down ‘til he learns,” Lenderman sings on the single ‘Rudolph’, drawling the final word before delivering one of the record’s definitive punchlines: “He’s just a jerk.”
The Asheville, North Carolina musician may not exactly relate to the pathetic, needy male characters that dot his songs, which often offer a pretty good picture of who we’re dealing with from the very first line – though he’s admitted to having hate-watched enough manosphere-adjacent content to explain why he’s quite well-versed in its language. But his expression of loneliness, shame, and melancholy is earnestly at the heart – and not an entirely separate part – of his songwriting. He’s an expert at blurring those lines. Despite his affability in interviews, it’s still hard to parse how much of the withering emotion on Manning Fireworks is supposed to feel personal – for Lenderman or the listener – and for good reason. The success of the 25-year-old’s 2022 breakthrough solo LP Boat Songs, not to mention the heaps of acclaim lauded at his band Wednesday’s 2023 masterpiece Rat Saw God, has created not only hype but a sense of personality around him that fans can easily to attach to, divorced as it might be from the knowingly questionable nature of his characters. But Lenderman clearly doesn’t want to be pinned down as any type of guy; he distances himself from the associations made in the wake of his last album, for example, by mostly doing away with sports references. Instead, we get images like that of “Lightning McQueen blacked-out at full speed.”
“So far as I can see, nothing good in the world has ever been done by well-rounded people,” the author Harry Crews, one of the biggest inspirations behind Manning Fireworks, once said. “The good work is done by people with jagged, broken edges, because those edges cut things and leave an imprint, a design.” Lenderman has an instinctive way of tapping into this fractured humanity, avoiding both judgment and redemption in his songs – these are scenes, not story arcs. A lot of the time, the tone he ultimately strikes isn’t a sardonic sneer but a kind of empathetic smirk, especially on the more acoustic songs where Karly Hartzman, Wednesday bandleader and Lenderman’s ex-girlfriend, tenderly joins in on vocals, like the opening title track and ‘Rip Torn’. Without the lo-fi charm that marked his earlier work – this is Lenderman’s first studio LP for ANTI- Records – he finds different tools to evoke the brokenness, not water it down so much as give it a particular texture: Landon George’s piercing fiddle on the opener, Shane McCord’s clarinet (“singin’ its lonesome duck walk,” as Lenderman puts it on the devastating ‘You Don’t Know the Shape I’m In’), what’s mysteriously credited as “bass clarinet abuse drone” on the closer, ‘Bark at the Moon’.
Longtime fans should rest assured that Lenderman still likes to accompany the mess his characters are caught up in with guitars that crash, squeal, and tumble over themselves, as already heard on singles like ‘Rudolph’ and ‘She’s Leaving You’. (The penultimate ‘On My Knees’ also boasts a killer guitar solo.) But if Manning Fireworks peaks with those fiery, sneakily anthemic tunes, ‘Bark at the Moon’, which sprawls out to a full ten minutes, is the kind of conclusion that seems to throw everything into the flames. There are certainly moments on the album that burn a little deeper in the real-life context of Lenderman’s recent breakup – Hartzman’s voice repeating the titular refrain at the end of ‘She’s Leaving You’ will always put a knot in my throat – or the placelessness of life on the road (a couple of the songs take place in hotels), but ‘Bark at the Moon’ offers little pretense: it’s clearly him zoning out to the Ozzy Osbourne song of the same name on Guitar Hero, or it used to be him. “You’re in on my bit/ You’re sick of the schtick,” he sings, “Well, what did you expect?” This may not be Lenderman being meta about his own career, though it’s hard not to imagine the ensuing distortion as a way of him wiping the slate clean to make space for whatever comes next.
As much as he’d like to totally shake off the expectations thrust upon him after Boat Songs, Lenderman’s self-awareness peeks through: “I’m speaking in tongues/ Those hiccups won’t quit,” he quips on ‘On My Knees’. Humour is once again on his side – critics have praised his combination of humour and pathos, but sometimes the relationship between the two is usefully subtractive: the humour undercuts the pathos, and vice versa. After all, the line in ‘Joker Lips’ goes, “Please don’t laugh only half of what I said/ Was a joke.” Like many of Lenderman’s songs, ‘On My Knees’ is a portrait of someone – could be anyone, really – hitting rock bottom. There’s certainly truth to the lines “Every day is a miracle/ Not to mention a threat,” even if it hits different knowing his critical status as a hero of the everyday. So Lenderman completes the verse with another joke, too specifically absurd to be expected: “Of bees nests nestled in a hole in the yard/ Of Travolta’s bald head.” Maybe half of what he says on Manning Fireworks is a joke, or the record’s half-full of characters who are the butt of the joke – sometimes that’s us, too – but the music always ends up poignant and incisive. It’s good work, and it cuts right down to the bone.