It may be found in the uniformly slow tempos, which have been a hallmark of his work since 2019’s beleaguered Here Comes The Cowboy. There’s a persistent sense of fatigue in this music, and though it’s “chill” in a Jimmy Buffett tropical hangover sort of way, it’s too much of a bummer to sound like lo-fi beats. It doesn’t feed you good feelings, and that’s the difference between this music and the funk beat Mac pulled up on his computer. It forces you to live in the headspace of a touring musician, someone who’s candidly chronicled how his line of work has made him gross and rough, whose addictions to alcohol and cigarettes have been more than just a subtext in his songs. It’s no coincidence that Five Easy Hot Dogs, the first of this seemingly lower-stakes canon of instrumental albums, was recorded during the road trip where DeMarco quit smoking.
This music was largely made during a few short breaks in DeMarco’s touring schedule following the release of last year’s subdued and subtly excellent vocal album, Guitar. It’s siesta music, but the way the beats bleed together not just from song from song but album to album suggests a kind of low-level anhedonia: a sense that no matter how much fun he has taking his dog on a seaplane or visiting far-flung corners of America, things don’t feel quite as new as they used to, and memories manifest as fuzzy blurs of vaguely felt experiences rather than a clear vision in the mind.
Maybe it’s because of age, maybe it’s because of the self-induced brain- and body-frying DeMarco’s chronicled since his early cigarette songs. The screwed-down tempo of his recent work would seem to suggest that something fundamentally cracked within the physical body of the entire Mac DeMarco project around Cowboy: a slacker-rock equivalent of Leyland Kirby giving his Caretaker project dementia. This lingering tinge of post-adolescent regret—of feeling you’re aging the wrong way—is so much of the reason listeners flock to DeMarco’s music in the first place, and it comes across as sharply in these four albums as anything he’s ever made.
In order to squeeze these feelings out of the music, you have to contend with the actual sound of it, and it’s here that a lot of the people bemused by his “Garbage Funk” video would most likely drop out. At least half of the music collected across these four albums’ combined two hours features DeMarco scatting in the raspy falsetto he started leaning into heavily on Cowboy, and though there’s a wistful quality to these wordless vocals, it’s a tough sound to spend even short periods of time with. This is probably how DeMarco sketches out melodic ideas before the words come into place, but as a vocal improviser, he’s no Betty Carter.
Dog on the Rock is the only one of these releases that didn’t make me feel anything numinous. It’s 38 minutes of scatting and near-interchangeable instrumentals, superlative only as the least interesting. The View From Tian Tan is like an extension of the place-based suites on Five Easy Hot Dogs, occasionally making use of a synth preset that sounds like the light thunk of a bamboo mallet. Inspired by a giant Buddha statue in Hong Kong that DeMarco must’ve seen on tour, it’s the only one of these without the scatting, which means it’s the album I’d recommend most readily. But it feels safe without any rough edges, less possessed by the melancholy DeMarco evokes so easily.
