Hangover Game

MJ Lenderman's "Hangover Game" moves through its unhurried length with the logic of a Sunday afternoon nobody wants to end. The production on "Manning Fireworks" generally, and here specifically, favors beautiful sloppiness — guitars that sprawl rather than cut, rhythm section swinging slightly behind the beat, Lenderman's voice pitched between singing and talking with the affect of someone narrating their own experience from a slight remove. The song's subject is the familiar territory of young adult drift: the morning after, accumulated small failures of ambition and relationship, the particular pleasure found in doing nothing well. But Lenderman's writing has more compression than the relaxed delivery suggests; images arrive specific and strange before dissolving back into the general haze. The emotional tone is oddly tender — hangover as spiritual state rather than physical complaint, enforced stillness that reveals something otherwise obscured. Sonically it evokes Pavement's graceful slacker aesthetics and early Guided by Voices, but Lenderman's sensibility is distinctly contemporary, processing those touchstones through a particular ennui. Best experienced with nowhere to be, ideally in a room with afternoon light slanting through half-drawn blinds.