featuring the very best of americana, alt.country and roots music
September 10, 2024
Scott Foley, purveyor of dust
We're in the midst of a fascinating time for our kind of music. Much like the period in the 60s that produced the Byrds and Gram Parsons, country is bleeding into, and is being bled into, by a couple different genres. Artists like Zach Bryan and Kacey Musgraves are succeeding outside of typical country fan bases, while pop figures like Post Malone and Beyonce are grabbing the attention of that country fan base from outside (to mention only the most prominent instances). Likewise, we see Waxahatchee and Wednesday incorporating elements of country into their indie folk and rock. Of course, this isn't an all of the sudden thing, since we can identify instances of all of these incursions from throughout the history of popular music. It's always been our line that it's all terrific for our kind of music, if for no other reason than to maintain that fresh-honed edge that we find so essential.
At present, one of the freshest instances of this phenomenon is MJ Lenderman's Manning Fireworks album, just released Anti Records. The recipient of fervent praise from all corners, Lenderman's fourth studio LP couples the North Carolina songwriter's slacker despondency with a guitar-drenched Crazy Horse-meets-Jason Molina iteration of country music. The artist himself seems bemused with the attention, even in light of the general enthusiasm directed at his band Wednesday's Rat Saw God from last year, and his own Boat Songs from '22. But Lenderman also comes across as a thoughtful young man, more purposeful than his fractured narratives might suggest: Please don't laugh, he sings on "Joker Lips", Only half of what I said was a joke.
Lenderman plays the majority of instruments on Manning Fireworks, co-produced with Alex Farrar who was also partly responsible for Wednesday, Waxahatchee, Indigo deSouza, and more. His guitar barks and bites on "On My Knees", not quite obscuring an engaging bed of melody: Everyday is a miracle / Not to mention a threat. Kicking to life with the punch of four drumbeats, "Rudolph" channels Lenderman's guitar into sludgy riff, later catching fire for a guitar hero solo. In interviews, he has spoken to the importance of looseness in his work, abandoning studio polish for the what-if of spontaneous combustion.
That off-the-cuff approach is demonstrated in Lenderman's lyrics as well, observations that are alternately self-deprecating, insightful, profane, and vulnerable. On "Rudolph" he plays with words and the repetition of sounds: How man roads must a man walk down 'til he learns / He's just a jerk who flirts with the clergy nurse 'til it burns. The acoustic title track begins the set with a striking poetic image: Birds against a heavy wind / That wins in the end. With programmed beats and clarinet, "You Don't Know the Shape I'm In" drops another image: We sat under a half-mast McDonald's flag. Both sonically and lyrically, there is a restless patchwork quality to Manning Fireworks, an idiosyncrasy whose charm grows with repeated listening.
MJ Lenderman isn't simply throwing lyrics and sounds against the wall, he has spoken about his interest in the dark Southern literature of Harry Crews, and how stripping everything down to its bleak basics allows for a glimpse at both sentiment and absurdity. The abandoned narrator of "Wristwatch" brags, I got a beach home up in Buffalo / And a wristwatch that's / Both a compass and a cell phone. His Wednesday bandmate Xandy Chelmis lends pedal steel to the song, and the band's frontwoman Karly Hartzman shares backing vocals on a handful of cuts. "Rip Torn" sheds musical pretense until Lenderman is left with only Landon George's fiddle, Ethan Baechtold's piano, harmonica, and acoustic guitar for a ramshackle cacophony. He flirts with self-sabotage on "Bark At the Moon", closing the album with more than six minutes of drone and guitar feedback, eschewing any opportunity for resolution or redemption. The final statement of Manning Fireworks is an inside joke.
And it's all beautifully broken. Like a Gen Z Gram and Emmy, Lenderman joined Katie Crutchfield on one of the year's outstanding songs, Waxahatchee's "Right Back To It". But none of this is permanent. Artists like MJ Lenderman haven't established a lasting outpost for indie country (we see this as a different thing than alt.country btw). These phenomena are always temporary, as fleeting as our restless musical attention span. Lenderman, Waxahatchee, Wednesday, etc will turn their focus elsewhere, and non-country fans will tire of country artists just as they've lost interest in strummy hey-ho indie folk acts like Lumineers and Mumford. For today, these artists serve as areas of growth and change for our kind of music, signs of life and relevance without which we threaten to become just another musical museum. MJ Lenderman's country isn't like most of what's come before beneath that genre heading. And it's that otherness, the brokenness and the short attention span of it all that are the victory of Manning Fireworks. It's a puzzle that doesn't need to be solved, a mess that we don't want to fix, a beautiful noise that may end up defining 2024.
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