Dan Mangan’s seventh studio album, ‘Natural Light,’ released via Arts & Crafts, functions as an essential roadmap for the modern folk survival kit. While his previous efforts saw Mangan rigorously experimenting with the boundaries of his sound—ranging from synth-heavy textures to complex jazz-adjacent arrangements—this record represents a soulful pivot back to his foundation. Born from an unplanned, six-day retreat in a remote Ontario cottage, the album strips away high-gloss artifice in favor of a living-room intimacy that feels both immediate and timeless. This transition is particularly striking when compared to the maximalist production of his previous album, ‘Being Somewhere’ (Arts & Crafts, 2022). While that record utilized a vast electronic canvas to explore isolation, ‘Natural Light’ seeks the opposite, finding its power in the physical, unmanipulated space between musicians.
The record’s sonic palette is an organic collision of domestic textures. Eschewing digital emulations, Mangan and his long-term collaborators utilized the cabin itself as an additional instrument, capturing a tangible warmth through vintage ribbon microphones and analog delay units. This back-to-basics approach profoundly shifts the album’s percussion and rhythm; where his earlier, more raucous work often relied on driving, anthemic drum kits to command a room, ‘Natural Light’ embraces a “found-sound” rhythmic philosophy. The percussion is feathered and soft, often feeling like a heartbeat or the rhythmic creak of the cottage floorboards rather than a digital metronome. This is exemplified in the six-minute opener, “It Might Be Raining”, which evolves from a sparse acoustic meditation into a lush band arrangement, allowing the rhythm to swell naturally like an approaching storm.
This unvarnished setting has also fundamentally transformed Mangan’s vocal delivery. On previous records, his voice often carried a projection designed to cut through dense orchestration or reach the back of a theater. Here, he adopts a whisper-close proximity, his voice cracking and settling into the grain of the room. Lyrically, Mangan moves beyond the stubborn folk-punk energy of his youth toward a more nuanced, prose-like exploration of the psyche. This philosophical shift is particularly evident on “Soapbox”, an angry political critique disguised as a beautiful ballad. The track utilizes a cheap 70s Baldwin Fun Machine organ to ground its biting social commentary in a sense of kitschy, suburban reality. Mangan describes the record as a love letter to his family and the world, marrying the heat of political resistance with a benevolent acceptance that love remains the core of human experience despite the “wolves at the door.”
By embracing vulnerability and stripping away unnecessary polish, Mangan has created an indie-folk portrait that feels exactly as the title suggests: recorded in natural light. Tracks like “Diminishing Returns” and “No Such Thing As Wasted Love” lean into 1970s folk-pop sensibilities, evoking the spirit of a campfire song for a world on fire. This rhythmic and vocal restraint allows the clarinets and slide guitars on “Melody” to dance more freely, creating a sense of affirmation and loss that isn’t crowded by heavy production. It is a work of revelation capturing an artist who has found his stride by trusting the spontaneous, almost ghostlike gifts of a room full of friends.
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