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Review: Mac DeMarco, Motion
There’s a good bit in Mac DeMarco’s Pepperoni Playboy documentary – or “Macumentary” – where the man of the moment looks up from the mess of his Brooklyn box studio and says: “Kids are always askin’ me; hey Mac how do you do it? What’s the trick?”
His bright, childlike eyes dart all around the camera lens as he leans over towards his mixer and adds: “It’s all pitch control, you dumbasses. Get yourself a tape machine and get your head out of that fucking Ableton shit, you morons.”
Mac’s lo-fi, warped indie-rock – and his piss-taking temperament – is partly what has got people in such a spin about his work. The peculiarly distinct sound has helped elevate the 25-year-old Canadian to king of a new wave of slacker rock with its own 90s style revival to go with it.
Hundreds came – dressed in ill-fitting shirts, turned up baggy jeans and dungarees – to catch a glimpse of it at his sell-out show at Motion on Tuesday, one of four stops in the UK on his world tour.
The gig took place in the main warehouse of Motion as opposed to the Marble Factory next door – to the detriment of the sound, it’s worth adding.
Opening track The Way You’d Love Her, the first from his new album Another One, struggled to fill the space and let the instruments breath.
Not that anyone seemed to care. A massive buzz had been building way before Mac had the chance to pull on his torn baseball cap and scuffed, red Vans.
And a roar, which had erupted when the band took to the stage, was still lingering around the warehouse which was jumping as soon as the first notes clashed.
Salad Days, the eponymous opener to Mac’s third album, released less than a year before his fourth, followed with more hysteria from the crowd.
By the time the band reached Ode to Viceroy, the bizarre tribute to Mac’s favourite cigarettes, the crowd had started rushing the stage and throwing beer cans, T-shirts, teething gel (yes, teething gel) and, of course, a bra.
By the time I got up to the balcony to see if the sound was any better there, a sweaty mosh pit had developed for second to last track Freaking out the Neighborhood (at which the guitar solos were duly chanted at the band). As with Mac’s slightly subdued performance though, the crowd only ever threatened to kick-off fully.
Still Together, sped up for a live outing, was a fitting end to a tight (if nothing else) performance which never quite seemed as mad as you would expect, given Mac’s slightly unhinged documentary persona.
The encore was a foray into something harder in the form of an over-the-top Metallica cover which looked very much like the band were acting out long-held dreams performing guitar solos half naked on stage as corny rock stars. The line between quality and irony was suitably blurred.
Sadly, it was probably one of the few moments the sound quality didn’t really matter.