Imagine that you’re a dirty haired teenager in the 90s and you’re hanging out with your friends, relaxing in your bedroom. The lights are dim, and your purple lava lamp bubbles and glides along your wall. You lay on the floor, sinking into the rug while twinging, slow guitar riffs reverberate around the room and soothe you to sleep. This is the flavor of Mac Demarco.
Mac DeMarco is surely an artist that is one of a kind. His music combines synthetic sounds, dreamy vocals, and soft harmonies that awaken a nostalgic feeling within the soul. On appearance level DeMarco may just look like another bummy indie artist, but his scraggly and rather simple choice of fashion add to his endearing appeal as an artist that doesn’t care about what anyone else thinks. His overall style is a refreshing contrast to the manufactured idols of the music world that gain quick and mindless popularity nowadays.
Mac DeMarco, born as Vernor Winfield McBraire Smith IV, is from British Columbia, Canada, and is a musician, singer, producer, and multi-instrumentalist. Demarco’s style is a tangled jumble of things including lofi, indie, blue wave, folk rock, and slacker rock. Basically, this just means that he has a very prominent laid back essence in his music. Many of his songs feature soft flat drums, vibrato effects on the guitar, and low frequency bass guitar. To date he has released six albums, with Here Comes the Cowboy (2019) as the most recent. An especially interesting aspect of his music is that he records his songs on reel-to-reel tape recorders to attain a vintage and crackly kind of sound. His music is an easy listen and is open to goofy interpretations as well as quiet reflections into one’s own deeper consciousness.
The first song that pulled me into what is the universe of Mac DeMarco is “My Kind of Woman,” which is a sappy sweet song about a romance between a head over heels boy and a girl that may not exactly reciprocate these specific feelings. DeMarco creates a genuine and glowing atmosphere by using soft synthetic chords as background noise and a gentle plucking guitar while he quietly sings under these sounds. His lyrics aren’t complicated, but the delivery and spacing of them produce goosebumps, yet are soothing enough for a baby to fall asleep to.
On another note, DeMarco rarely takes himself seriously as his music videos include weird and lighthearted phenomena such as dressing up as a lizard cowboy, or a woman, or Michael Jackson, or Homer Simpson. This reminds us that in the end music is just music and that we’re meant to have fun with it, no matter what anybody else thinks.
I like this post! I also think adding the pictures is a nice touch and adds a good effect. I also like the way you structured the post and think it flows well.
A few of these musical genres are very uncommon. I have not listened to many of the genres listed. I may have to investigate “blue wave.” I am always interested in broadening my musical selection!
I always love the way you talk about the music genres; your introduction paragraph is so detailed and descriptive. It really sets the tone for the cool music you introduce us to.