Review Summary: a charming manifesto of post-cool
Dan Mangan has a steely determination to make music—and by extension, himself—accessible. His music over the years has accomplished this on its own by being sly, unassuming, and conversational, but his resume belies more deliberate efforts. This is a Juno-award winning Canadian singer-songwriter who will respond to every Instagram story tag, a journeyman of theatre tour circuits who after a sold-out show waits in the lobby to say hello to all the people in the hours-long meet-Dan-Mangan queue, and the creative mind behind the burgeoning Side Door Access initiative—the “Air BnB of house concert booking”, designed to move working musicians away from the big stage and into the living rooms of "regular" people. As such, his accessibility allows a private glimpse into his own process as an evolving recording artist: namely, his disappointment with the public and critical reception of his ambitious, heady
Club Meds. Mangan hasn’t held back from expressing the heartbreak he experienced when his political, dark and abrasive rock album was less celebrated than the cutesy sing-a-longs he wrote as a young man. The release of
More or Less doesn’t overtly touch on the subject, but the glimpse behind the stage curtain does add a lot of colour to the story of Dan Mangan.
Equally, reducing
More or Less to a safe response to prior disappointment is to say nothing of the album’s successes. Where
Club Meds was dense and claustrophobic (and I will maintain, his best work),
More or Less is airy and open—but the musical arrangements are as thoughtful as they’ve been since Mangan first broke out of his mold with 2011’s orchestral
Oh Fortune. Many arrangements may seem less thorough on first listen, but songs like ‘Lynchpin’, ‘Can’t Not’, and ‘Which Is It’ still reveal Mangan to be an expert in complementary melodies: in fact, much of the space left in the album’s production allow for these melodic moments—both vocal and instrumental—to have greater impact. More traditional tunes—‘Fool for Waiting’ and ‘Just Fear’—use this production style more as a foundation, and while the results are less immediately gripping, they allow Mangan to return to what brought him fame in the first place: his simple, observational songwriting.
If you were never a fan of Mangan’s lyrics, the songs that lean on his storytelling will change nothing of your opinion—
More or Less cements that Mangan’s casual, puzzle-piece delivery of simple concepts will remain his calling card. For fans of this version of Mangan, there is much to celebrate: the track listing bustles with charming one-liners, orbiting the issue of entering your mid-30s and feeling no longer “with it” anymore. I would argue this is why
More or Less really works—it’s not a crowd-pleaser because it is a rebuttal of
Club Meds, but because Mangan sells this concept of moving past his “cool” phase so well. “
Sweet cul-de-sacharine / top up the margarine / universal A.D.D. / helicopter parenting”, Mangan sings on ‘Cold in the Summer’ before quipping “
I don’t know where the gig is / I don’t know if it’s cool / But I still get lost in it / and I got more to lose”. Elsewhere, Mangan is full of dadly, sentimental imploring—“
don’t you strike the stage / when your teenaged heroes have all gone grey / don’t count the roses, don’t wait to love”—but the advice-column, smiling-uncle-in-the-stands vibe comes off as distinctly earned. Mangan isn’t a young buck and he’s been through the ringer—“
I might make it through these quarter-life blues", he warbles behind plunky basslines and jangly guitars. I’ll say this: Mangan was 35 at the time of recording, and unless he expects to live ’til he’s 140,
More or Less shows up in his catalogue well past his "quarter-life". Might he get through the blues though? It sounds like he already has:
More or Less is a manifesto of post-cool, and for those also limping out of the mid-2010s haze of self-importance, Mangan is a good—and accessible—companion to have.
