ALBUM REVIEW: Mac DeMarco - Five Easy Hot Dogs

    A few years back, Mac DeMarco was the indie darling off the success of albums like Salad Days, 2, or This Old Dog. I remember being pretty heavily into a Beatles phase at the time of This Old Dog coming out, but even years after when I had begun exploring music freely I had a friend who was a major Mac DeMarco fan, at a point when it had been two years after Here Comes the Cowboy, which is now four years old as of the time of writing. Maybe this lack of activity has led to some falloff of his following, but he's still an incredibly popular indie artist, so I have to ask - what exactly is the appeal of this album? Five Easy Hot Dogs is certainly a very vibe-heavy album with its rough and laid-back instrumental stylings, but it's all style over substance here. Many of the instrumentals don't warrant further listening after a second spin, and in spite of some admittedly unique instrumentation at points and a semi-fun concept at the heart of the album, there is little to Five Easy Hot Dogs past the surface level. To come back after a prolonged break with an all-instrumental album is simply confusing and certainly not all that interesting.

    Now I, admittedly, am not a Mac DeMarco die-hard, so I freshened up a little before this album. Heard some Salad Days material, as well as This Old Dog and 2, and some accompanying demos for said projects. Well, I can see some of the appeal - his entire body of work certainly has a very heavy laid-back feel to it, his lyrics ain't half bad in my book, and his voice has a certain quality to it that is, if nothing, suited for the type of music he makes. Even still, the material I heard from Salad Days and 2 did not really scratch a proverbial itch - frankly, I preferred the demos that I heard to the finished songs most of the time. Even with all that in mind, I can tell you one thing - Mac DeMarco is not that interesting as an instrumentalist. Because of the vibe-heavy atmosphere that his recordings center around, ultimately a lot of the instrumentals, to me at least, ended up sounding the same. Can you see where this is going? Five Easy Hot Dogs bleeds into itself throughout the entire record, and not in a particularly creative way. So much of the material sounds like a continuation of itself, to the point where I genuinely mistook songs for one another. This is not helped at all by the song titles, which are all just city names, maybe with a number after them - to be fair, if you read the story behind the album it makes more sense, but it doesn't do the material any favors.

    So much of the material here is dreadfully unfinished sounding. Even the demos I heard from previous DeMarco records sounded more realized, creative, and enjoyable sounding than the material on Five Easy Hot Dogs. Everything here sounds sparse and lacking any major focus, which is often detrimental to the songs being super entertaining - I'm not saying I need Soft Machine-esque instrumental tracks, but give me something other than a repeating pattern of four chords. Sometimes we do get that something more, but even then it's not always the best - "Portland" has these awful discordant synths at points, which I think makes it stand out as probably the album's worst track if I really had to pick one (so much of the album is inoffensive and same-y that it's hard to pick one as worse than the other, though). "Chicago", though, has some nice percussion thrown into the mix along with a pretty filling bass part, which at least makes it one of the better songs on the record by some distance, and the acoustic riffing on "Chicago 2" is at least more fun to listen to than most of the album. If these songs in particular were more fleshed out and had some lyrics, it could make for a pretty good single - take notes, Mac!

    It's hard for me to see Five Easy Hot Dogs as little more than a confusing and empty project that could have been more. Had these instrumentals either been given more time in the oven, had been given some more meat on their bones, or had been finished up into full songs with lyrics and vocals, this could've been an enjoyable and vibe-centric record. As it stands, Hot Dogs is neither compelling enough nor filling enough to warrant future listening past a couple tracks. While it's not an offensive album, it's the kind of music that I imagine plays in purgatory's shopping mall with how stilted and ambition-lacking so much of this project is. Perhaps Mac will come back with another album after this, and I certainly hope it's a more compelling project than Five Easy Hot Dogs; as it stands, all I can really say is that the album score is in the title. 

RATING: ✯✯✯✯✯✯✯✯✯✯

Listen to Five Easy Hot Dogs.