Dan Mangan is such a classy guy that he handed the most explosively crowd-pleasing moment of the night to another performer. There was nothing false about the wide grin he wore, midway through his set, when spoken-word dynamo Ivan E. Coyote walked on-stage and slew a boisterous Vogue Theatre with 15 hilarious minutes about her too-young girlfriend while the band vamped on “Pine for Cedars”. Really, the pleasure was all Mangan's. And ours. This might have been a history-making evening for a city that can be maddeningly indifferent to its own talent. But Mangan is a total freak, a self-made success with an audience that'll buy up every last seat in the Vogue Theatre for him and then root for the guy like they're all from one super-well-adjusted extended family.

And what a fresh-faced crowd it is. When Coyote climaxed her bit by calling herself a “pussy crook”, she raised the roof with the one transgressive part of the evening. Mangan later recalibrated the vibe when he politely dropped the word “shitless” from “So Much for Everyone”. He also told the world's cleanest joke at one point. Basically, the kid just don't work blue. It speaks to his appeal. His talent and the quality of his best songs aside, Mangan's obvious good nature is magnetic. As his collaborators tirelessly insist, what you see is really what you get, which is a hard-working dude with a warmly poetic sensibility and an honestly soulful voice. And unless you're looking for somebody who mutilates himself on-stage, waves his cock around, or otherwise turns angst into spectacle, Mangan and his three bandmates—guitarist Gord Grdina, upright bassist John Walsh, and drummer Kenton Loewen—are beyond reproach as performers.

Like the pros they are, they turned up the heat on songs like “Sold” and a more fleshed-out “Journal of a Narcoleptic”, while sing-along set closer “Robots” was especially rousing. Meanwhile, the six-piece mini-orchestra tapped especially for this show gave numbers like “Basket” an agreeably seat-of-the-pants quality when things threatened to get a little too slick. The horns and strings also heightened the skronk of “Some People” by several orders of free-jazz magnitude. As always, Mangan seemed entirely at home on the expansive stage. Even the calculated moments were soapstone smooth, as when he shifted gears from his beefy baritone to a violent bellow in “Road Regrets”, thereby bringing the audience to its feet. Or when he hit the floor during “Some People”, and had them dancing in the aisles. Absent Veda Hille, the entire theatre stepped in to cover her parts in “The Indie Queens Are Waiting”.

Speaking of which, the indie queens and tattied East Side punks were nowhere to be seen, nor were any of Vancouver's other more visible tribes. That left us with the aforementioned crowd of young, cheerful folk of better-than-average taste, apparently drawn from a middle class that hasn't completely vanished yet. They deserve their music too. The low and constant hum of chatter through opener Jesse Sykes's set was a little douchey—a lot of people missed out on some haunting songs pitched somewhere between Victoria Williams and a depressed Grace Slick. But aside from that, it was oddly comforting seeing so many nice, nice, very nice people in one place.

Georgia Straight, May 2010