New Albums from MJ Lenderman and Jack White

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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