Oh Fortune, the third album by Vancouver artist Dan Mangan, is an artistically mature, sonically detailed and generally beautiful collection of music.
His first studio album, Postcards and Daydreaming (2007), showed obvious potential, despite the fairly generic acoustic-folk sound. With his 2009 release Nice, Nice, Very Nice, Mangan began expanding his radius of creativity, introducing a more varied style to his songwriting and more expression to his lyrics. It gained critical acclaim, received heavy rotation on Canadian radio, and was shortlisted for last year’s Polaris Prize. Though it may be lacking in infectious sing-alongs like the 2009 single “Robots,” Oh Fortune is Dan Mangan’s most ambitious and inspired album to date. Continue reading
Indie movies are a great thing. When it comes to the art of film you know there’s no truer testament than the Independent, for everyone involved has cast aside the confines of the mainstream and commercial for the realism of artistic passion. If you’re not in it for the money – and with the dry budget of many indie movies, you can be sure they aren’t – then you’ve got to be in it for the art. But for the indie fan, it sometimes just doesn’t work as well as you wish it would.
