It wasn’t until recently that I was ensnared in the velvety gap of Mac Demarco. The guy has been making his rounds through every pocket of NYC, crawling through the veins of the internet, reaching every cultured world citizen for the last seven years. How I’ve made managed to bypass such an utterly cool, meditative sound I do not know. What I do know is that everything about him is incohesive save his music. This is perhaps why the listening experience is so completely unique. In layman's terms, Mac Demarco the person is worlds apart from Mac Demarco the musician. Sure, you get some of the punk-ass / schoolboy ‘tude here and there, but any irreverence seems to be canceled out by the silvery sounds of the self-entitled “Pepperoni Playboy.”
It’s like that one time Rilke said, “Our own heart always exceeds us,” except that might lead one towards calling the musician transcendent; a dangerously serious word for the outrageously irreverent goon with resting smirk-face. Like remember that asshole-kid in your physics class that was forever being sentenced to the back of the room where he tended to his his daily orders of business (booger flicking and drawing grotesque images atop innocent laminate desks)? Keep that image in your head for a second. Now affix some impossibly tender, impossibly smooth, slinky mouthpiece to the bloke and you’re looking at Mac.
And so in lies the appeal of his newest album, "Another One" -- a volume that is at first familiar in sound then suddenly unrecognizable in its naked sentiments. Vulnerability is the buzz-word. A type of vulnerability that doesn’t escape easily, but rather makes itself known in the jangle and twang; synthesized sound carrying us into the throb of melancholy. Authorial intention considered, we’re not sulking here; we’re simply strapping heartfelt words onto a bunch of glitchy guitar solos and letting them sail out of our atmosphere. At 25, brooding just is a bit too precocious.
For a good time follow Mac on Twitter @msldemarco.
