The many jerks of MJ Lenderman’s Manning Fireworks

It’s telling that Wednesday’s version of Drive-By Truckers’ “Women Without Whiskey” is the most faithful on their covers compilation Mowing the Leaves Instead of Piling ’Em Up. Like many of Mike Cooley’s best songs, “Women Without Whiskey” meditates on misery and lands on absurdity. The protagonist promises to give up drinking as long as he can drink for a few more months; he expects to think about liquor long after death. On Wednesday’s version, guitarist and backing vocalist MJ Lenderman takes over lead vocals from his then-girlfriend Karly Hartzman and, while he isn’t exactly doing an impression of the D-BT’s Mike Cooley, there isn’t much to split them. Lenderman may have grown up resenting Drive-By Truckers — he mistrusted any music his dad loved that much — but he eventually became a zealous convert.

Mowing the Leaves Instead of Piling ’em Up by Wednesday

It’s not hard to decipher the influences behind Lenderman’s fourth solo album, Manning Fireworks, out today via ANTI-: Jason Molina and David Berman, the late greats of alt-country songwriting; Cooley and Patterson Hood, who wrote troubled and troubling characters in their own conflicted South; and Hartzman herself. In interviews, he’s referenced the hard-boiled Southern writers Harry Crews and Larry Brown, the funnier and weirder Richard Brautigan, and the pitch-black comic film director Todd Solondz.

Lenderman resonates with art that takes an absurd approach to everyday misery, and it shows on Manning Fireworks. Amanda Petrusich wrote in her obituary for Berman that he “instinctively understood that there is beauty and humor in these dumb, ordinary things — that the mundane might be the only place to really go searching for the sublime.” Lenderman shares this philosophy. “The things that are funniest to me tend to be funny because there’s some poignancy or some sadness to them,” he said in an interview with Loud and Quiet last year. Here, on “Joker Lips,” he sings, “Please don’t laugh / Only half of what I said / Was a joke.”

The difference between Lenderman and many of his influences is that it really is a half-half split. “Women Without Whiskey” is an emotional slog, an exploration of alcoholism and desperation that never takes its eye off the bottle. Lenderman’s style is not so oppressive, and he seems to make a point of weaving a thread of absurdity into almost every verse. The man in the middle of the slacked-out and charming “She’s Leaving You” is given the ultimate mid-life crisis cliche: “Go rent a Ferrari / And sing the blues / Believe that Clapton was the second coming.” The sneering protagonist of “Wristwatch” brags about a “houseboat docked at the Himbo Dome.”

Manning Fireworks by MJ Lenderman

Elsewhere he just straight-up calls people jerks. The opener and title track traces a man’s growth from “perfect little baby” to “jerk.” Two tracks later, on “Rudolph,” he asks, “How many roads must a man walk down til he learns / He’s just a jerk?” His down-and-outs are at most a couple of lines from stumbling face-first into a wall of irony. Near the top of “Rip Torn,” someone passes out in a bowl of Lucky Charms.

Lenderman sings these misfortunes with a slight croak and a gentle drawl, the types of things that will deepen and knot with age. His delivery sounds effortless, never lazy, just as the songs themselves borrow from alt-country’s slacker side without ever succumbing to sloppiness. Part of his gift – part of what has turned him into this year’s most adored indie musician – is how loose, unstudied, and even naive he sounds in the middle of songs that, on closer inspection, are meticulously poignant. Sometimes his lines fit together at perfect angles, as though he’s found the only syllable that would fit into a particular corner of melody. My favorite is on “Rip Torn”: “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.” It would read like a nursery rhyme if it weren’t so melancholic.

For all of that character work, though, Manning Fireworks peaks when Lenderman writes into a mirror. The best song here is “You Don’t Know The Shape I’m In,” with its delicate acoustic guitar and super-compressed keyboard-generated beat. Absurdity and melancholy are utterly inseparable, a picture of Noah’s Ark at the water park, a break-up under a half-mast McDonald’s flag. When a clarinet blows in, adding a little quiet dignity to the agony, Lenderman shrinks it to size: “Clarinet / Singin’ it’s lonesome duck walk.”

Someone’s being a jerk in that song too. Lenderman’s voice, backed by Hartzman, sounds almost broken when he reveals who it is.