In Of the Farm, a contrived little family engages in some emotional thrust and parry during a weekend on some property in rural Pennsylvania. Joey, a thirty-five-year-old Manhattan executive, his new wife, Peggy, and her smart pre-teen son, Richard, have come to visit Joey's widowed mother, who still lives on the family farmland. Feelings of resentment and self-pity frustrate the gathering.
This slim, 1965 novella by John Updike was the first I have read by the American author. I have mixed feelings about it. Although the emotional scab-picking can seem indulgent in moments, tender feeling comes in the balance—and Updike, with elegant prose, can be forgiven for lingering in anticipation of those little resolutions.
Noisy guitars, country influences vie on MJ Lenderman's new album.
The latest by MJ Lenderman sometimes sounds hard-luck;
other times, hard-bitten. Both fates come in spades on Boat Songs.
“TLC Cage Match” opens with an acoustic guitar soon
accompanied by a sympathetic slide guitar, and then comes a lucid Lenderman
with his reedy and resigned vocal: “It’s hard to see you fall like that, though
I know how much of it’s an act.” “SUV” imposes overdriven guitars and feedback
on the bitterly steady beat, and the bad memories are seared in with the
lyrics, “I still have the key to your boyfriend’s SUV / I keep it by my bed
like a picture of you and me.”
Songs weave back and forth between the sounds of
Modest Mouse and Drive-By Truckers.
MJ Lenderman lives in Asheville, North Carolina. His
solo work—and his work with the band Wednesday—pulls between 1990s noisy
shoegaze guitars and country rock. Boat Songs, released April 29,
2022, is less of a lo-fi production than the Wednesday releases, but the lyrics
remain eagerly vulnerable, like on “Under Control” when Lenderman carefully
changes chords on an electric guitar and sings, “I had it under control, and
then it snow-balled and rolled and rolled and rolled / And I don’t have control
anymore.” The reckoning ends with the verse, “I got my wheels in a ditch /
There’s a word for this, for what used to scratch the itch / And then some day
it quit / Ain’t that a bitch.”
His sense of humor streaks through the album,
especially on “You Have Bought Yourself a Boat”—listen and hear the countrified
funk of the earnest and absurd. And the album opens with “Hangover Game” and
its lyrics that scoff at the myth of Michael Jordan suffering from flu or food
poisoning during his epic “Flu Game” against the Utah Jazz in Game 5 of the
1997 NBA Finals: “Oh, he looked so sick / It was all over the news / But it
wasn’t the pizza, and it wasn’t the flu / Yeah, I love drinking too / I love
drinking too.”
Note: I had not heard of MJ Lenderman until Boat Songs. I am a fan.
