MJ Lenderman is best known as the guitarist and co-song writer for the neo grunge Americana band Wednesday. But with Manning Fireworks he definitively steps out to announce his arrival as a solo artist of genuine stature.
Manning Fireworks is actually his fifth solo outing but it’s a significant step up from anything he’s done hitherto and has, quite rightly, been met with universal acclaim.
Think Pavement meets Teenage Fanclub via Dino Jr., where Lenderman and his alter egos inhabit a low key, white trash world that’s glaringly un-romanticised. And in which local losers live out their non existences in over-lit, wall-stained motel rooms, watching cable TV and smoking weed.
But dig beneath that surface and you unearth a seriousness and gravitas as Lenderman makes a genuine effort to face up to, or to at least get a better understanding of where that existential ennui is coming from.
Once you find out that he’s recently split up from his long-time partner and fellow Wednesday band member, Karly Hartzman, that explanation, it seems, is blindingly obvious.
But to his credit, instead of wallowing in his pain Lenderman quietly masks the source of his angst, and his songs remain enigmatically elusive, separated by a thick pain of misted glass. His is a world that remains pleasingly out of focus. Comfortably one of the albums of the year.
Jack White seemed to be a man living the musical dream. After the White Stripes split up in 2011, he founded his own record label, Third Man Records, to record and release albums by his favourite and often long-forgotten artists. While embarking upon any number of impressive side projects, including the Raconteurs and the Dead Weather.
And he released his first couple of solo efforts, Blunderbuss in 2012 (reviewed by me here) and Lazaretto in 2014 (which I reviewed here), both of which were met with justified acclaim.
But since then, the wheels seem somehow to have ever slightly come somewhat off. There’s nothing egregiously wrong with the three solo albums that he’s released in the interim. And in principle, we try to applaud artists when they consciously seek to force themselves out of their comfort zone and into new territories.
But each new release was beginning to sound increasingly less like an actual Jack White album. And the suspicion that all was not well was only accentuated by many of the public appearances he made on the various talk shows, together with the increasingly shrill decrees that were emanating from his base in Nashville.
So what a relief it is to sit down and listen to his new album, No Name. It wouldn’t be completely accurate to say that this is exactly the album we might have expected him to have released in the immediate aftermath of the disbanding of the White Stripes. But it wouldn’t be a million miles off either.
All of that virtuoso, genre-stretching, sonic bombast has been put to one side and what we’re served up instead are 13 tracks that have been stripped down to their bare essentials before being blasted noisily into the regal stratosphere. Welcome back.
Watch MJ Lenderman’s She’s Leaving You:
And Jack White’s That’s How I’m Feeling
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