A year and a half since his debut full-length album 2, Mac DeMarco has released his second album, titled Salad Days.
2, which was recorded in his Montreal apartment in 2012 apparently while only wearing a pair of underwear, was longlisted for the Polaris Music Prize in 2013. Like his previous albums, DeMarco wrote and composed every song on Salad Days, recording each instrument himself.
With Salad Days, DeMarco has brought us another album pulsing with clear-toned guitar riffs that slip out of the speakers, drums that keep time with your pulse and a voice that sounds like he’s singing to you from inside your own ear. The sound of the album is a slight shift from 2, but still stays true to his lilting, easy-going rock sound.
DeMarco still gives us a dose of his acoustic songwriting with the track “Let My Baby Stay”, which seems to be a sequel to “Still Together” from his previous album, mirroring chord progressions, strumming patterns, falsetto and lines like “half of my life.”
DeMarco works the keyboard more in Salad Days, using it for most of the instrumentation in “Chamber of Reflection” and “Passing Out Pieces”. However, DeMarco’s skill in layering two guitar tracks, usually one strumming chords and the other picking out a counter melody to his vocals, continues to shine in his music.
“Macky,” as he refers to himself in many of his songs, has given us another album of songs celebrating life’s imperfections: when relationships get tough, when the weekend ends, when things don’t go so smoothly, and as he writes in the song “Blue Boy”, when we get “Worried about the world’s eyes, Worried every time the sun shines, Worried about his haircut.”
Mac DeMarco will be playing at Toronto’s NXNE in mid June.
