Dan Mangan - Nice Nice Very Nice

Ever since Devendra Banhart’s bare feet shuffled into our consciousness at the start of the decade, there has been a steady, yet constant, trickle of… well, no-one is even sure what to call it. Nu-folk? New Weird America? Freak folk? The list of possible nomenclature is as long as the variety of practitioners is wide, from the uber-traditional Slow Club and The Avett Brothers to the indie posturing of Bon Iver and Noah & The Whale. Landing somewhere in the middle of all this is Canadian Dan Mangan, back with a sophomore effort, ‘Nice Nice Very Nice’, four years after his ramshackle debut ‘Postcards & Daydreaming’.

Having spent that time - a gap that would normally be suicidal in today’s ever fickle musical landscape - trudging round the world armed with only his guitar and a fierce work ethic, his reward, along with a loyal fan base, has seemingly been those most precious of things, studio time and money. Sonically at least, this step up a league suits him fine, although the steady hand of someone as experienced as producer John Critchley no doubt helped. Mangan seems to have gone for a sanitised, polished quality, his bright, clean acoustic guitar taking pride of place in the mix and only occasionally ceding the limelight to flourishes such as the slide guitar on ‘Sold’, a fuzzy solo on ‘Tina’s Glorious Comeback’, and horns and assorted strings of ‘Fair Verona’. Indeed, at times what grabs you most are the parts that have been missed out. ‘Robots’ contains a beautifully subtle pre-chorus of sighs and simple banjo plucking, along with the perfectly weighted dramatic pauses of both ‘The Indie Queens Are Waiting’ and ‘Tina’s’.

Less successful is the apparently scattergun approach to styles and influences employed. Although his taste in collaborators is beyond reproach, over twelve tracks he covers, in his own words, indie-rock roar (‘Robots’), orchestral pop (‘Fair Verona’), come-down chamber-folk (‘Set The Sails’), and clapboard-shack bluegrass (‘Some People’). That’s pretty ambitious, and although they’re not all as bad as they sound, his strength lies in the simple and delicate found within the likes of ‘Indie Queens’, his duet with Veda Hille, and ‘You Silly Git’, even if the former flies a little too close to Plain White Tees’ ‘Hey Delilah’. Variety may well be the spice of life, but by soaking up the experiences of his travels Mangan seems to have lost a little focus and instead of subsuming ideas and concepts subtly into something he can call his own, he’s like a kid in a candy store, eager to try out each and every flavour without realising the sickly accumulative effect.

All of which is a shame, as he is a clearly talented wordsmith and possessed of a voice weary beyond his years, seemingly educated by bourbon and Lucky Strike, and not entirely unlike a young Tom Waits. Most impressive when elevated to an angry growl, like the rants in ‘Basket’ and ‘Pine For Cedars’, it really should be the peg on which everything else hangs, especially on an album dealing with the travails of the travelling troubadour and the dichotomy inherent in giving up normal life to be successful at the thing you love. Opener ‘Road Regrets’ - “the cost is more than what you get paid / do it anyway” - sets a theme which runs through the loss of integrity (“body and soul were bought and sold”), doubting your own ability (“try to break up with your pride / and start to flirt with satisfied”) to simply missing home (“I do like the road / but I’d be better at home”). In fact, his clarity in capturing the pitfalls of endless touring only serves to highlight the lack of musical coherence. Less really can be more, and eclectic need not mean unfocused; the aforementioned Mr. Banhart can attest to that. The travesty is that in place of nice, nice, very nice, it’s more a case of good, yet could, and should, be better.