Mac DeMarco - This Old Dog
Drowned In Sound 80
The word 'wackiness' is rarely used positively. If someone is labelled wacky they are, at best, slightly irritating or, more often than not, painfully try-hard.
Mac DeMarco has trod the fine line of wackiness throughout his five-year-career. His musical output has been consistently amazing, from meek beginnings on 2, to 2015's rather sombre, almost nostalgic, Another One EP. However, his social media presence shows a man more interested in dick jokes and farts than skew-with indie pop. This personality has broken through into his slacker rock/Postcard pop records at times, but thankfully, on the whole the man has held back from the quirkiness and let his work do the talking.
Luckily, this restraint continues on This Old Dog, the jolly prankster's fourth long player. The return of the Mac brings all the usual ingredients. A reverb laden guitar riff here, a floating vocal there. It's what we've come to expect from the man formally known as Vernor Windield McBriare Smith IV. Kicking things off with the rather reflective 'My Old Man' it almost feels like Mr DeMarco might have actually learnt from his PST mistakes. It might sound pretentious, but it's hard not to use the word 'growth' when describing the first few tracks of the record. First single 'This Old Dog' and the aforementioned 'My Old Man' sound surprisingly dejected. Musically it's classic Mac DeMarco, but a hell of a lot quieter. It’s like the sadder moments of Another One turned down to 1. At times it feels like the record is whispering to you, forcing you to lean in to pay that extra bit of attention to what's going on.
This might sound a bit boring, but I can assure you that it's quite the opposite. Mac DeMarco has crafted 13 songs of solid swirly indie pop that captures the essence of summer with each and every strum. 'One Another' and standout 'Dreams From Yesterday' are pretty much the musical equivalent of walking on the beach on one of those sunny, yet slightly windy, June afternoons. You know the type of days. The ones filled with ice cream, chip butties and penny arcades. The teenage days you see in the movies with ice cream parlours, awkward romances and pleasant conclusions.
Unlike his previous efforts, This album has a real 'feel' to it. It’s a proper, old fashioned, album. A concerted effort has been made to make every track flow perfectly, creating something bigger than the sum of its individual parts. Every guitar sound has been perfectly positioned and every synth expertly placed, taking the listener on a journey through the mind of a truly unique individual. A surreally sincere bloke in a cap who might have just made the album of his career.
This Old Dog is the sound of an artist on top of his game. An artist shedding every inch of wackiness from his bone and sounding all the better for it.
Let’s just hope record number four isn’t some sort of dick and fart opera. Saying that though, if anyone can make that work, Mac can.
Tue May 09 16:43:37 GMT 2017The Guardian 80
(Captured Tracks)
Related: If I’m going in, I’m goin’ in hard
When it comes to his relationship with his father, Mac DeMarco has decided not to sit on the fence: “He’s kind of a piece of shit,” was one recent verdict on the man who walked out on him when he was four. But his musical take on their relationship – which dominates his third full-length album – is more nuanced. Opening track My Old Man expresses his growing fear, over acoustic guitar and reverb-drenched organ, of seeing his dad when he looks in the mirror. The album ends with Watching Him Fade Away, in which even woozier organs help relay the complex feelings of losing someone you dislike yet are inextricably bound to (“Haven’t got the guts to call him up / Walk around as if you never cared in the first place.”). There’s undeniably a bid for respectability going on here – DeMarco once famously performed with a drumstick up his bum, which is a reputation that takes some shedding. But this melancholic approach – serious themes, stoned demeanour – seems a smart way to reposition himself.
Continue reading... Thu May 04 21:00:20 GMT 2017The Guardian 80
(Captured Tracks)
The LA-based singer-songwriter steps away from his Beavis and Butthead onstage persona to make a thoughtful, tender and musically tight third album. DeMarco has always worn his talent lightly, but finally he sounds focused, reflecting on relationships like a millennial Cat Stevens, particularly those with his absent father and his long-term girlfriend. The 27-year-old still sings in languid, unadorned tones over the sun-dappled disco shuffle of For the First Time, but there’s a growing awareness of his own agency. On Still Beating he admits: “I never thought some silly songs could ever go and hurt someone.” But what beautiful heartbreak this is.
Continue reading... Sun May 14 07:00:09 GMT 2017Pitchfork 79
The thing people love about Mac DeMarco is also the thing people hate about Mac DeMarco. To fans, he’s a decidedly unpretentious singer-songwriter with a wacky sense of humor. His extracurricular gross-out antics—getting naked in videos, sticking a drumstick up his ass onstage—are evidence that he doesn’t take himself or the world too seriously, and is someone who rightly thinks rock music has room for the fun and silly. To his detractors, these stunts are at the very least an annoying mark of an archetype—the lazy, mugging, unshaven, drifting-through-life slob à la Bill Murray in Stripes—that has worn out its welcome in the 2010s. DeMarco’s actual music is chill, loping, slightly goofy, slightly druggy, and sometimes seemingly half-asleep, which is to say, it has such a clear relationship to his persona that it amplifies the reaction to his persona. You have to take the whole thing—the guy who shows up in videos and onstage, and the person singing these songs—together.
At this point, a radical change-up for DeMarco would be weird—he’s got his style, it works, and he’s sticking with it. But This Old Dog, DeMarco’s third album, does show some signs of growth. Compared to the two records before it, the new album is less cluttered, never using two words when one will do, and generally going easy on the woozy guitar effects. There’s more acoustic guitar and less processing, which frees it from the post-chillwave context of his earlier music. For a guy who seems to live life off the cuff and in the moment, his music feels more timeless.
This approach brings to mind singer-songwriters of an earlier era, particularly iconoclasts like Harry Nilsson, Randy Newman, and JJ Cale. The title track brings to mind Little Joy in its unhurried and confident sense of swing, and DeMarco’s natural warmth and weariness shine through. “Baby You’re Out” tumbles beautifully through its chord changes like a soccer ball falling down a stairwell that manages to hit every fourth step. “One Another” twinkles like an earlier generation’s soda jingle, with a little slouch that invites finger snaps with every backbeat. If 2 brought to mind a dank basement, the best songs here throw open the windows and let in the sunshine.
The move to a more “classic” sound suits DeMarco’s music, and it’s also a reminder that what at first glance seems like laziness might actually be brutal efficiency. On a casual listen, DeMarco seems to kick back and let everything fall into place, but his music demonstrates a relentless devotion to craft, with all the fundamentals intact. Each melodic shift, every turnaround on the chords during the choruses, every bridge—all are exactly where they should be. Even though they are not derivative, you swear you’ve heard them before because they show such a proficiency for songwriting structure.
By now, DeMarco has mastered the art of recording, at least within the parameters he’s established for himself. In addition to playing every instrument, he produced and engineered This Old Dog, and the arrangements are minimal and impeccable. His voice is recorded bone-dry to enhance his conversational tone—he sounds like he’s never more than a barstool away. The bass and drums are so locked-in they seem like a single instrument. Every brush of acoustic guitar sounds like it’s coming from right in front of you, and when he cuts loose on his electric and gets spacier, as he does during a gnarly freak-out that serves as the coda to the lengthy “Moonlight on the River,” the textures are both rich and thematically appropriate.
There’s a longstanding idea in pop songwriting that, depending on how the words are delivered, you can say a great deal with clichés, and DeMarco’s approach to lyrics has always been disarming in its simplicity. A great deal of what has been called “indie rock” thrives on being elliptical and obtuse—think Stephen Malkmus, a slacker guitar hero from an earlier generation who has some surface-level similarity with DeMarco, but never wanted to give too much away. You never knew exactly what Malkmus was singing about; Mac’s approach to words is more akin to a highway billboard, short and sweet enough to be heard when driving by at 75 MPH. A song like “My Old Man” takes a common sentiment (“Looks like I’m seeing more of my old man in me”) but DeMarco’s unvarnished approach helps these mundane observations land, and those who know something about his life and his troubled relationship with his father get an extra layer of meaning. Sometimes the words are pure boilerplate (“My heart still beats for you,” “A wolf who wears sheep’s clothes”) but since low-key craft is the order of the day, “mechanical” isn’t such a damning adjective.
There’s nothing particularly wrong with This Old Dog, it’s more that DeMarco is keeping his sights low. Some people might appreciate this record more than his last two, with the extra refinement of the sound, others may prefer the earlier stuff, which had a bit more humor and with lyrics that painted more colorful pictures. It’s a push. DeMarco’s problem, if you can call it that, is a good one to have—he owns his sound and continues to write songs that fit within it. For DeMarco and his audience both, all joy depends on this comfort.
Thu May 04 05:00:00 GMT 2017Tiny Mix Tapes 50
Mac DeMarco
This Old Dog
[Captured Tracks; 2017]
Rating: 2.5/5
Mac has been coasting by on his inimitable charm for a while now, and for whatever reason, it still works on me to some extent — the charm, that is. It might not be worth going into exactly why — speaking only for myself — I might still be fool enough to not find it wholly undermined by the majority display of nonspecificity on This Old Dog; it might even be worth wondering if those two factors aren’t in fact intrinsically related in the context of this album, as if its prevailing superficies of blandness is some kind of extended joke in keeping with Mac’s “fun-loving” persona, “goofy” as he is supposed to be. But whatever spiny issues surround questions of authenticity and personas — and clichés — there’s still something to be said in individual cases like this, even if the topic in general and as a whole is exhausted and some care has to be exercised in its invocation (and boy does it). Here it is relevant, not least because Mac himself makes it so whether he means to or not.
But before we get too much further into that, it’s more useful, for now, to try to make a brief and provisional inventory of themes, sounds, etc.:
A. The most prominent subject matter of this album is the at-the-time impending death of his mostly absent father (who has since recovered, a possibly awkward — or redemptive — fact that for us must remain external to the matter at hand), and the most noteworthy thing about this is the frank way Mac portrays his ambivalence about it. This encounter with filial confusion — and not various other forms of “introspection,” like the uncertainty of getting older, weary-before-his-time stuff that have already been a feature of his work (Salad Days’s title track, among many others) — is what’s thematically distinctive about This Old Dog. It might be too soon to say that Mac will never sing about cigarettes again or that the Mac of oozy pitched-down sleaze is gone forever, but they aren’t here at least. Time to purge those superfluous watery humors by the eyes instead.
B. Despite having moments that tip it toward being his most “challenging” album lyrically (if being challenging has anything to do with being serious), This Old Dog might be his least interesting instrumentally and musically. Of course, attempting to assess Mac DeMarco albums according to a metric of comparative “challenging”ness is a basic category mistake, yet nevertheless…. he’s drifting — deliberately, or just by not keeping his eyes open — closer and closer to the so-called middle of the so-called road, a dangerous zone that not many can survive unscathed. What you’ll find here is a greater predominance of acoustic guitars compared to previous albums, even a harmonica, and there’s a real acoustic piano in the background on one song (the twangy, reverby electrics that used to be something of a personal signature are for the most part relegated to providing a little unobtrusive decoration). And yet, with the possible exception of the very, very brief “Sister,” one doesn’t have the impression that he’s using the opportunities that this kind of instrumentation supposedly offer the musician (greater intimacy, humanity, spontaneity, and all those terrible things). Mac still uses his synths from time to time too, but he doesn’t seem to have found any new settings for them. As a whole, then, it’s perfect for a “chill” BBQ or perhaps for blasting out into a deserted amphitheatre overgrown with weeds on a lazy summer’s day. But those are best-case scenarios: it’s just as easy to imagine that Mac is covering his own songs in some insipidly accessible pseudo-bossa nova style in preparation for pitching them to the particular kind of cafe that, in my neck of the woods at least, seems to think its customers won’t be too distracted by such things.
This Old Dog by Mac DeMarco
C. Mac’s aforementioned charm rides at least partly on not giving a shit, so it’s either unfair or a misunderstanding (of whatever it was that has been responsible for giving him any appeal) to expect ambition. Still, not demanding ambition doesn’t mean expecting slackness. When he sings “There’s a price tag hanging offa half of all that fun,” I can’t say what that price tag might be for the man himself, but whatever the other consequences might be, his musical mellowing out and “maturing” might be just one of them (a high price!). And this isn’t the only aspect of the album’s descent into the commonplace. When it comes to the lyrics, the lack of (evident) artifice, the almost willful blandness — or more charitably, generality — sometimes highlights the sentiment in question, at the same time precise but unspecific (hence, recognizable and generalizable). Sure, the most effective songs here aren’t the generic love songs, the songs posed so often as a kind of advice-delivery system to younger protégé/self, and sure, there are songs that make such flagrant use of clichés (I don’t ever want to hear about a wolf in sheep’s clothing again, in any context) that no amount of irony could plausibly count as a defense. But the album’s standout track “Moonlight on the River” has the effect it does precisely by evoking what could easily seem like platitudes (“everybody dies”) in a context that is utterly frank in its ambivalence (this is one of the songs mentioned above dealing with the possible death of his father), “I’d tell you that I loved you, if I did.” It isn’t harmed either by being the longest track on the record, featuring an extended coda of spacey arpeggios that don’t qualify as ambition per se, but do qualify as something I like. We’ve all heard someone fuck around with an echo pedal or other such device, but I’ll confess to still thinking it’s cool. I won’t try to convince you that it’s new though, because it isn’t.
D. A song like “Moonlight on the River” makes it seem as if Mac is more able to be sincere in a song than when acting as himself in public. It’s interesting, then, to read in interviews that Mac says he has tried to minimize the gap between the “real” Mac and the public face. I’ve no doubt he means it, but it’s easy to point out that public persona is a concept more equivocal than that might imply — it sure ain’t the same stuff being expressed in songs as it is in the actions of the public Mac. And perhaps, then, overcome with an enthusiasm for distinctions, you might want to say that the private Mac is also twofold, that there’s a real private depth that can never be plumbed as well as the way he acts in the private sphere (never mind the philosophical and political status of either form of privacy). The temptation would then be to try to pin them all together like butterflies to a board, either the same one pin slid through them all to create a neat but uncomfortable overlap or arranged carefully side by side, the better to engage in precise comparisons, to catch out inconsistencies, to perform a peculiar taxonomical game. But we would no doubt find — for Mac as for everyone else — these distinctions too are in fact too few. “Often a heart tends to change its mind,” he sings on “This Old Dog,” — a little mind for every organ, what a multiplication of homunculi! Instead of looking for a locus of control in a persona — single, solid, and probably conscious — you might look for uncharacteristically vigorous agglomerations of tissue, with all their irregular and subverbal tendencies. But without getting carried away with too much digging around in those innards, there’s another twist in the tale: the very next line of the song in question seems to invoke some kind of diurnal agency instead: “A new day decides on a new design.” So on to the outer spheres, to the celestial movements that govern those of our globe we go, contemplation of which I’m sure you’ll agree is a loftier and more edifying business than the sordid character-based speculation you’ll find here.