{"id":622143,"date":"2026-09-12T05:40:09","date_gmt":"2026-09-12T05:40:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/622143\/"},"modified":"2026-09-12T05:40:09","modified_gmt":"2026-09-12T05:40:09","slug":"mac-demarco-dog-on-the-rock-seven-off-the-two-seaplane-dog-the-view-from-tian-tan-album-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/622143\/","title":{"rendered":"Mac DeMarco: Dog on the Rock \/ Seven Off the Two \/ Seaplane Dog \/ The View from Tian Tan Album Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

It may be found in the uniformly slow tempos, which have been a hallmark of his work since 2019\u2019s beleaguered Here Comes The Cowboy<\/a>. There\u2019s a persistent sense of fatigue in this music, and though it\u2019s \u201cchill\u201d in a Jimmy Buffett<\/a> tropical hangover sort of way, it\u2019s too much of a bummer to sound like lo-fi beats<\/a>. It doesn\u2019t feed you good feelings, and that\u2019s the difference between this music and the funk beat Mac pulled up on his computer. It forces you to live in the headspace of a touring musician, someone who\u2019s candidly chronicled how his line of work has made him gross and rough, whose addictions to alcohol and cigarettes have been more than just a subtext in his songs. It\u2019s no coincidence that Five Easy Hot Dogs<\/a>, the first of this seemingly lower-stakes canon of instrumental albums, was recorded during the road trip where DeMarco quit smoking.<\/p>\n

This music was largely made during a few short breaks in DeMarco\u2019s touring schedule following the release of last year\u2019s subdued and subtly excellent vocal album, Guitar<\/a>. It\u2019s siesta music, but the way the beats bleed together not just from song from song but album to album suggests a kind of low-level anhedonia: a sense that no matter how much fun he has taking his dog on a seaplane or visiting far-flung corners of America, things don\u2019t feel quite as new as they used to, and memories manifest as fuzzy blurs of vaguely felt experiences rather than a clear vision in the mind.<\/p>\n

Maybe it\u2019s because of age, maybe it\u2019s because of the self-induced brain- and body-frying DeMarco\u2019s chronicled since his early cigarette songs<\/a>. The screwed-down tempo of his recent work would seem to suggest that something fundamentally cracked within the physical body of the entire Mac DeMarco project around Cowboy: a slacker-rock equivalent of Leyland Kirby<\/a> giving his Caretaker<\/a> project dementia<\/a>. This lingering tinge of post-adolescent regret\u2014of feeling you\u2019re aging the wrong way\u2014is so much of the reason listeners flock to DeMarco\u2019s music in the first place, and it comes across as sharply in these four albums as anything he\u2019s ever made.<\/p>\n

In order to squeeze these feelings out of the music, you have to contend with the actual sound of it, and it\u2019s here that a lot of the people bemused by his \u201cGarbage Funk\u201d video would most likely drop out. At least half of the music collected across these four albums\u2019 combined two hours features DeMarco scatting in the raspy falsetto he started leaning into heavily on Cowboy, and though there\u2019s a wistful quality to these wordless vocals, it\u2019s a tough sound to spend even short periods of time with. This is probably how DeMarco sketches out melodic ideas before the words come into place, but as a vocal improviser, he\u2019s no Betty Carter<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Dog on the Rock is the only one of these releases that didn\u2019t make me feel anything numinous. It\u2019s 38 minutes of scatting and near-interchangeable instrumentals, superlative only as the least interesting. The View From Tian Tan is like an extension of the place-based suites on Five Easy Hot Dogs, occasionally making use of a synth preset that sounds like the light thunk of a bamboo mallet. Inspired by a giant Buddha statue in Hong Kong that DeMarco must\u2019ve seen on tour, it\u2019s the only one of these without the scatting, which means it\u2019s the album I\u2019d recommend most readily. But it feels safe without any rough edges, less possessed by the melancholy DeMarco evokes so easily.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It may be found in the uniformly slow tempos, which have been a hallmark of his work since…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":622144,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[692,93,61,60,278,514],"class_list":["post-622143","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-albums","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-music","tag-web"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/622143","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=622143"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/622143\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/622144"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=622143"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=622143"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=622143"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}