Mac DeMarco – Another One
Canada’s rumpled princeling singer-songwriter returns with a mini album featuring eight new songs.
HEART, HER, ME, hers: scan the repetitive titles of these eight tracks and Mac DeMarco doesn’t really seem to be stretching the pop lexicon with his brisk follow-up to last year’s Salad Days. What he mines from that standard vocabulary, however, is golden, brushed and burnished songs that largely mute any slacker zaniness to explore the traditions of heartbreak.
A Heart Like Hers and Without Me sound like they are dissolving on the spot, porous guitars and DeMarco’s hesitant phrasing (“Long as I know she’s happy… happy… without me”) leaving unsteady and treacherous gaps.
The Way You’d Love Her and Another One, roughly conventional tales of lost love and romantic yearning, are destabilised by half-melted guitars, the sense that behind these sweet and splendid songs, there’s somebody only just holding it together. The surface of Another One is pure pleasure; underneath, it’s not quite so easy.
Listen to The Way You'd Love Her from the album.