"Birds against a heavy wind that wins in the end," mourns MJ Lenderman in the very first words of his new album Manning Fireworks.
The Wednesday guitarist, fisher and deceptively poignant poet's voice wavers through the titular opening track with the frailty of its character's shame and their languor of defeat. The acoustic beginning to Manning Fireworks underscores Lenderman's refined vignettes — featuring characters, places and events often hard to excavate and even more challenging to analyze.
At the centre of "Manning Fireworks" is an antagonist who sneaks backstage to "hound the girls in the circus," scorns the world with their theology of original sin, and loses money at the race tracks betting on horses named after Steve Earle songs. He's annoying, problematic and even the dogs in town seem to hate him.
But under Lenderman's watchful eye, he's also our protagonist. There's no disdain in the voice or any venom in the sound. Instead, he plays a soft dirge for a man who was once a "perfect little baby" but is now just a jerk. Lenderman reports him the exact way he sees him in his mind, a character that's a part of him.
So much of Manning Fireworks sees Lenderman slowly revealing his insecurities through deadbeat but empathetic characters. Whether it's the divorcee who rents a Ferrari, heads to Vegas and "believes that Clapton was the second coming" in "She's Leaving You" or the drunk who passes out in his breakfast cereal in "Rip Torn," the songwriter works his own destruction into every nook and cranny of the record.
"Rip Torn," in particular, uses Lenderman's typical analogies of celebrity in a subversive action that humanizes the characters, rather than distancing them. Fame brings alienation and hostility but also gives us legends and myths, the building blocks for how we relate to one another. "You said 'There's men and then there's movies / Then there's men and Men in Black' / You said 'There's milkshakes and there's smoothies' / You always lose me when you talk like that" natter on the players in the song's story, trying to connect to each other's soul through popular culture.
Lenderman used this approach to songwriting in troves on 2022's beloved Boat Songs, in particular with celebrities. Dan Marino sightings, Jackass joviality and Michael Jordan getting drunk are all used as placeholders for family, love and the frailty of the human condition. Boat Songs no doubt put Lenderman's solo career on the map, but part of it felt lacking in agency, as if he was too dependent on the stories and myths of others to decide how he should feel. Even when he does use this approach on Manning Fireworks, he manages to do it with more delicacy and subtlety – digging into the deeper meaning and impact of legends that we all know but will never understand.
The power of empathy Lenderman so beautifully captures in his lyrics is, in turn, told through his other voice: the guitar. On Manning Fireworks, he knows how to make that thing talk. There are no more ghosts in these guitar solos, and the wiry licks and riffs are as sure-footed and confident as the tightly crafted structure of each song. It's easy listening, yet fiercely complex.
His lackadaisical strumming, rhythm and nuclear-fried solos dubbed innumerable times throughout "On My Knees" is a cacophony of buzz so loud that he needs to borderline scream to get his words to cut through the mix. "Rudolph," likewise, sounds like he's trying to strangle the strings on his guitar neck as he wrestles the thing in a death match.
The simple, dependable chord progressions throughout all of Manning Fireworks give the unpredictability of his guitar work the weight and force of a meteor's impact. The fact that he ends almost every song with a guitar solo doesn't feel superfluous or indulgent, partially because his technical ability never outshines just how unprecious he is about them.
Much of Lenderman's earlier work was grand and ambitious in scope: long epics with minutes of uninterrupted instrumental. 2019's self-titled album is just over an hour long with only nine songs, leaning into the sombre darkness of Jason Molina. It's a fantastic collection of tracks, but easy-listening it certainly is not. His conscious decision to tighten up his songs has certainly made him more accessible, and Manning Fireworks – with its slick production and compact run-time – is his most approachable.
The bullet-proof pop structure of every song (most of which clock in at a perfect three-and-a-half minutes) builds one on top of each other, compressing with each passing second until the ultimate release of "Bark at the Moon." The 10-minute song begins like every other track, with Lenderman pouring over the malaise of loneliness by way of heavy drinking and playing Guitar Hero. When he's done howling at the stars, the song releases into a brain-frying seven minutes of guitar feedback and ambient tranquility. It drifts through subtle movements, with unrushed horns and guitar toilings, and its hypnotic cycles and tones feel as though they could play for an eternity in the cosmos.
Like a star imploding in on itself, Manning Fireworks' finale simply couldn't withstand its own dazzling acme. It's the release he's been waiting for since the first utterances of the album. A place of motionless absolution, a place where no heavy wind can win.