neil-young

MJ Lenderman, seen here playing his Jazzmaster with Wednesday, first started on guitar at the age of 8, when he was entranced by the music of Jimi Hendrix.

Photo by Tim Bugbee/tinnitus photography


Over the past few years, singer-songwriter MJ Lenderman has had a taste of success with his band Wednesday and his latest solo albums. On his new solo release Manning Fireworks, his artistic depth is on full display in his carefully unwinding, twanging riffs and sage lyrics, informed in part by a sturdy sense of humor.

English actress Glenda Jackson is credited with what’s now become an old performance-art adage: “Comedy is much harder to do than drama.” During my time living in New York City for the last eight-and-a-half years, I spent countless hours in open-mic basement dungeons—where small rodents would occasionally die and pungently decay beneath the floorboards and cellar stairwells—studying amateur standups workshop ideas in two- to seven-minute allotments of stage time.

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Fake Fruit’s Hannah D’Amato takes flight, while the band’s drummer, Miles MacDiarmid, lurks in the background.

Photo by Daniel Topete

Fake Fruit bandleader Hannah D’Amato tells a tale of two Neils as she, PG staff, and reader Kevin Ramsay dig into their songbooks.

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The My Bloody Valentine tone maestro helps design an intricate, complex, but ultimately intuitive source of potent octave fuzz and overtones galore.

Huge swaths of unexpected sounds that can exist well outside the My Bloody Valentine tone sphere. Beautiful, high quality build. Fascinating, organic interactions between controls.

Pedalboard space freaks are going to complain that it’s big.

$299

Fender Shields Blender
fender.com

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4.5
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Kevin Shields tone chasers are a minor cult—sharing insights and discoveries about ways and means to replicate the intoxicating, enveloping sounds of My Bloody Valentine’s LPs, and in particular, their masterwork, Loveless. It’s a curious pursuit, in a way, for it is well documented that Shields created most of that album’s time- and space-bending sheets-of-sound guitar parts via the rather economical combination of reverse reverb and the vibrato on a Fender Jazzmaster.

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