Mac DeMarco
★★★★
Five Easy Hot Dogs
MAC’S RECORD LABEL. CD/DL/LP
North American road trip spawns easeful, transporting instrumentals.
“Kind of like being on tour, except there weren’t any shows”, says DeMarco of Five Easy Hot Dogs. Its 14 mellow, meditative tunes are named for the various US and Canadian cities in which they were recorded, DeMarco travelling light and tapping a spartan palette mostly comprised of acoustic guitar, hand percussion, woolly bass, beat-boxes and phat keys hatched from a vintage TX7 tone generator. This brings thematic unity, the clave percussion and flanged acoustic arpeggios of Vancouver 2 and Vancouver 3 like different threads of the same movie score, and the film in question conceivably shot on Kodachrome Super 8 and framing a naval-gazing stoner on his hols. Some years on from 2019’s last ‘proper’ LP Here Comes The Cowboy it may be, but this is no holding exercise. Instead, think beautifully conceived curio.