Graham Reid | | 1 min read
She's Leaving You
Sometimes you feel a weird connection with an album that you kind of adopt it, tell friends who stop listening the second you mention the unfamiliar name of an artist or just listen to in private wonder what it would take for this artist to become more than a cult act.
We leave you with the names Howe Gelb, Julia Jacklin, the Unforgiven and the Shoes.
And now MJ Lenderman.
Outside his position in North Carolina's alt.country-cum-rock band Wednesday, 25-year old singer/guitarist Lenderman runs a parallel career in idiosyncratic slacker-folk with pedal steel, fiddle and slide guitar.
This fourth studio album under his own name elevates his croaky vocals and lyrics – which roam from the witty to the weird – into downbeat, observational Americana gone wonky.
On the visceral guitar rock of Rudolph, the man who once thought of being a priest, appropriates from Dylan: “How many roads must a man walk down . . . til he learns he’s just a jerk . . . I wouldn’t be in the seminary if I could be with you”.
His wit can sting but be self-inflicting, as on Wristwatch: “You say I’ve wasted my life away. Well, I got a beach home up in Buffalo and a wristwatch that’s a compass and a cell phone that tells me you’re all alone”.
The grinding Crazy Horse sound of She's Leaving You catches him at his cynical best: “She’s leaving you . . . go rent a Ferrari and sing the blues. Believe that Clapton was the second coming”.
And Lenderman is quite the guitar hero himself in that ragged lineage from Neil Young to The War on Drugs.
An album you adopt as much as admire, enjoy and champion.
Lenderman, remember that name.
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You can hear and buy this album at bandcamp here.
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