Juno Award
The Juno Awards, more popularly known as the JUNOS, are awards presented annually to Canadian musical artists and bands to acknowledge their artistic and technical achievements in all aspects of music. New members of the Canadian Music Hall of ...
-winning third album by
Canadian
Canadians (french: Canadiens) are people identified with the country of Canada. This connection may be residential, legal, historical or cultural. For most Canadians, many (or all) of these connections exist and are collectively the source of ...
singer-songwriter
Dan Mangan
Daniel Mangan (born April 28, 1983) is a Canadian musician. He has won two Juno awards and has toured extensively throughout North America, Europe and Australia, having released 5 studio LPs and numerous EPs and singles. He has scored for feature ...
, released on September 27, 2011, on the Arts & Crafts label. The album debuted on the
Billboard
A billboard (also called a hoarding in the UK and many other parts of the world) is a large outdoor advertising structure (a billing board), typically found in high-traffic areas such as alongside busy roads. Billboards present large advertise ...
Canadian Albums Chart the week of October 15, 2011, at number nine.
The album is the follow-up to 2009's ''
Nice, Nice, Very Nice
''Nice, Nice, Very Nice'' is the second album by Canadian singer-songwriter Dan Mangan, released on August 11, 2009. The album was a shortlisted nominee for the 2010 Polaris Music Prize.
The album's title is a quotation from a poem contained in A ...
'', which was short-listed for the
Polaris Prize
The Polaris Music Prize is a music award annually given to the best full-length Canadian album based on artistic merit, regardless of genre, sales, or record label. The award was established in 2006 with a $20,000 cash prize; the prize was incr ...
. In contrast to its predecessor's sparse acoustic guitar, ''Oh Fortune'' relies more often on fuller orchestral arrangements, described by ''
Now Magazine
''Now'' (styled as ''NOW''), also known as ''NOW Magazine'' is an online publication based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Throughout most of its existence, ''Now'' was a free alternative weekly newspaper. Physical publication of ''Now'' was suspen ...
s Carla Gillis as "expansive, epic orchestral indie rock".Gillis, Carla (September 22, 2011). , ''
Now Magazine
''Now'' (styled as ''NOW''), also known as ''NOW Magazine'' is an online publication based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Throughout most of its existence, ''Now'' was a free alternative weekly newspaper. Physical publication of ''Now'' was suspen ...
''. Retrieved on 2011-10-12. It has also been described as having a darker emotional and lyrical tone, comparable to its namesake poem "
O Fortuna
"O Fortuna" is a medieval Latin Goliardic poem which is part of the collection known as the ''Carmina Burana'', written early in the 13th century. It is a complaint about Fortuna, the inexorable fate that rules both gods and mortals in Roman and ...
", without becoming too grim. David Berry of the ''
National Post
The ''National Post'' is a Canadian English-language broadsheet newspaper available in several cities in central and western Canada. The paper is the flagship publication of Postmedia Network and is published Mondays through Saturdays, with ...
'' describes the album's theme as "a kind of bald appraisal of the situation that packs it full of so much more — meaning, weight, beauty, humour — than your typical singer-songwriter’s over-emotive pigeonholing".
At the
2012 Juno Awards
The Juno Awards of 2012 honoured Canadian music industry achievements in the latter part of 2010 and in most of 2011. The awards were presented in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada during the weekend of 31 March and 1 April 2012. A week of related events b ...
, Mangan received the award for
Alternative Album of the Year
Alternative or alternate may refer to:
Arts, entertainment and media
* Alternative (''Kamen Rider''), a character in the Japanese TV series ''Kamen Rider Ryuki''
* ''The Alternative'' (film), a 1978 Australian television film
* ''The Alternative ...
for ''Oh Fortune''.
Reception
''Oh Fortune'' has received mostly positive reviews. Francois Marchand of ''
The Vancouver Sun
The ''Vancouver Sun'', also known as the ''Sun'', is a daily broadsheet newspaper based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The newspaper is currently published by the Pacific Newspaper Group, a division of Postmedia Network. Published si ...
'' gave the album four and a half out of five stars, claiming that "sonically, Oh Fortune shines".
AllMusic
AllMusic (previously known as All Music Guide and AMG) is an American online music database. It catalogs more than three million album entries and 30 million tracks, as well as information on musicians and bands. Initiated in 1991, the databas ...
's Andrew Leahy awarded the album three out of five stars, calling it the "most ornate thing angans ever done" and comparing it to
The Swell Season
The Swell Season is a folk rock duo formed by Irish musician Glen Hansard and Czech singer and pianist Markéta Irglová. "The Swell Season" name is derived from Hansard's favourite novel by Josef Škvorecký from 1975 bearing the same title. ...
. Now Magazine also gave ''Oh Fortune'' three out of five stars, saying that Mangan "has leapt ahead not one or two steps, but three or four."
The album was named as a longlisted nominee for the
Toronto Star
The ''Toronto Star'' is a Canadian English-language broadsheet daily newspaper. The newspaper is the country's largest daily newspaper by circulation. It is owned by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary of Torstar Corporation and part ...