In-store: Dan Mangan

Dan Mangan

Criminal Records. Saturday, March 13, 2010.

Now this is what buzz looks like. A day previous, I'd thought the crowd was a bit incommensurate with the level of hype around the bands playing at Criminal Records. This time, however, there was a rather healthy crowd on hand, filling up the store quite nicely. I arrived not long after the end of the opening in-store set by Aidan Knight, and in the brownian motion of people moving out and moving up I managed to snag a nice spot. Despite worse weather — blech — than the previous day, there was an obvious charge in the air with folks excited to see Dan Mangan. The changeover was fairly quick, as there was some personnel overlap, including Knight joining Mangan on guitar.

"On a personal level and on a musical level, I love Aidan Knight so much that I forced him to play with us."

"The joke's on you — I don't know any of the songs," Knight replied.

That deadpan exchange was typical of the low-key looseness at hand for this show and Mangan's stage presence was one of his foremost charms. Apparently not one to take himself too seriously, he killed time trying to think of a joke while everyone else finished their preparations. Once everything was ready to go, the four-piece launched into "Road Regrets", followed by "Sold" — and in the middle of the latter Mangan paused the song to tell the joke he'd been thinking of during the soundcheck. That was followed by a new song that Knight and drummer Kenton Loewen hadn't previously heard, but they pulled it off well. Musically, it was a straightforward sound, with Mangan on acoustic, Knight throwing in some unshowly fills on electric guitar, and Michael Owen-Liston adding backing vox while playing stand-up bass.

Coming in without really having checked out his stuff previously, I found it generally enjoyable. In this sort of situation I probably paid less attention to Mangan's lyrics than I would have if I were listening to his album. I liked "Tina’s Glorious Comeback" and his closer, an insidiously catchy one about Robots, which I'm guessing is the "hit". With Hannah Georgas stepping up to add some vox, it turned into a delightful singalong with Mangan holding the mic out over the audience. That's one that can get stuck in your head for a week or two.

Mangan has the gift of coming off as totally, unimpeachably genuine. Plus a great look — slightly cuddly like he could cook you a nice pasta dish, but rugged enough with that beard to indicate that he could chop some logs for the fireplace — someone you could take home to mom and dad, in other words. And though that makes it tempting to damn him with the faint praise of his breakthrough album title — Nice, Nice, Very Nice — even in a short set like this, one could see why Mangan is winning a larger audience. Is it the worst thing in the world to consider the possibility that nice sells?

Listen to a track from this set here.

Were I a slightly more diligent sort, I migth have stuck around for the last of the in-store sets, to see how Hollerado have come along in the year since I saw them in these exact circumstances. But there was a thick, younger crowd jockeying for position, and I figured I'd leave my spot to someone who'd appreciate it more, and headed back out into the rain.