M.C. Hansen
Album: 3
Label: Sentimental Music
Tracks: 15
Website: http://www.mchansen.com

M.C. Hansen is a Danish aficionado of all things Americana, a guitar picker and musical storyteller-in-song who on the evidence of this release has a lot going for him. He's been a travelling musician since 2003, playing around 100 shows a year with his own band in tow, and seems to embody the spirit of Townes Van Zandt in his elegant, thoughtful, natural songwriting. His guitar playing matches his writing in its considered phrasing and able picking style, and his singing is attractive and authentic without being imitative or artificial, if perhaps bereft of that final degree of rough lived-in edge that we like to hear in our Americana.

It's hard to fault any of these elements, and the first disc of this triple-disc release (yes, you heard right!), recorded in Dallas, delivers a very fine half-hour's worth of original songs with deft and well-judged acoustic folky-country-style backings from Milo Deering (pedal steel, mandolin, dobro, fiddle), Vanessa Peters and Paul Averitt (backing vocals) and Rip Rowan (keyboards, percussion and production). These songs are to be regarded as the "infant songs", says M.C.

So far, so good. But what do we get on the remaining two discs in the set, then? Disc Two presents "the curious teenage songs", slowly building a personality; here, as "full-band" (in some cases amounting to little more than tastefully electrified) versions of six of the eight songs (and the brief instrumental Øresund) from off Disc One, together with three further songs (With Blood On My Hands, 2010 and Baby Blue). Whereas Disc Three, recorded in Denmark, is described rather fancifully by M.C. as "the experimental album where we ran the accordion through a wah-wah pedal and I sang into a can", but actually has plenty of piano and electric guitar alongside the floaty atmospherics and spacier ambience and doesn't really sound at all weird. That disc gives us three of the same songs that appeared on both Discs One & Two yet again, together with those one of those otherwise exclusive to Disc One (Come Friday), two from those mentioned above as being new to Disc Two and one more song (Fields With Army Haircuts) that turns out to be unique to Disc Three. Now, y' got all that?!…

The rub is that, however, notwithstanding the top-drawer quality of the writing and the playing, there doesn't always feel to be a convincing enough reason for having two different versions of any of the songs (let alone three!), and for much of the time these fuller-clothed variants might be viewed as having little more than curiosity value - a view with which I don't entirely concur, since, to be fair, each of the three discs can sensibly enough be taken and listened to in isolation with a perfectly satisfying result. For M.C. views the three discs as embodying the three musical personalities he has: "the part I understand, the part I make up and the part I didn't know existed". That at least is an honest and unpretentious admission, and a mission declaration of which no self-aware artist should be ashamed of making. It's just that the chunky-cased triple-disc format is in this instance a touch unwieldy when I suspect there's a supremely consistent, and generously-full, single disc compilation lurking just below the surface of this project.

David Kidman