The opening track, ‘My Old Man’ expresses the anxiety of growing older as the outwardly care-free musician pensively reflects on ‘the price tag hanging off of all that fun’. The album engages with break-ups, faltering family relationships and the loss of a loved one. This Old Dog demonstrates clear maturation, more explicitly pondering personal issues that the melancholic tone of previous tracks such as ‘Chamber of Reflection’ and ‘A Heart like Hers’ had only hinted at. Yet, it seems hard to reconcile the deliberately self-deprecated public persona of a man who stuck a drumstick up his anus while delivering a rendition of U2 – Beautiful Day at a concert (if you haven’t seen this, what on earth do you think the internet is for?) with the more sensitive, forlorn voice that comes through his lyrics. Such a persona oozes through his slacker rock, self-proclaimed ‘jizz-jazz’, style of music, a unique concoction of jangling acoustic guitar and loping synthesized notes.

Just a thirty second scroll through his Instagram is enough to infer that this guy doesn’t take himself seriously contorted facial expressions, topless air guitars and photo locations including ‘Little Turkey’, ‘Big Bird’ and ‘Iron Penis’ all contribute to his blasé, stupid but impossible-to-dislike persona. Mac DeMarco: a happy-go-lucky, scruff ball of a Canadian singer-songwriter ‘rolling through life, to roll over and die’ as the chorus of the title song on his best-selling album to date, Salad Days, openly announced to the world. It considers how his use of social media jars with the sentimental lyrics beneath his care-free hipster exterior. This is a review of Mac DeMarco’s fifth LP, again written for the University newspaper.

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