{"id":173443,"date":"2025-08-25T04:32:11","date_gmt":"2025-08-25T04:32:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/173443\/"},"modified":"2025-08-25T04:32:11","modified_gmt":"2025-08-25T04:32:11","slug":"mac-demarco-guitar-album-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/173443\/","title":{"rendered":"Mac DeMarco: Guitar Album Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

The most affecting moment on Guitar comes 45 seconds into the fourth tune, \u201cNightmare.\u201d The song begins mid-meter, DeMarco\u2019s voice arriving so ahead of the beat that it\u2019s like he has been searching for someone he can tell his troubles to. Maybe there\u2019s been an argument, and his partner is still sleeping it off in the next room. It is a miracle, he confesses, that she sticks around at all. \u201cRoll up those sleeves, boy,\u201d he sings in a diminutive falsetto, cuddly as a teddy bear. \u201cSmoke the whole pack\/There\u2019s no turning back from this one.\u201d In a few perfect lines, this is the war of always trying to get your shit together, of trying to be good enough for the life into which you have wandered. By all interview accounts, DeMarco\u2019s partner, Kiera McNally, possesses a saintly forbearance, sticking with him from those rough-and-tumble salad days to these idyllic times of pruning olive trees on an island<\/a>; here he is, waking up bummed, then rolling up his sleeves to try and deserve her.<\/p>\n

In two minutes, \u201cNightmare\u201d bottles both sides of Guitar\u2014DeMarco\u2019s bummer survey of what he has been and his grim commitment to what he may still be. The past comes back to haunt him on \u201cKnockin\u2019,\u201d a simple country-funk number where regrets he thought he\u2019d overcome arrive like uninvited guests for a housewarming party at the spot where he hopes to spend the rest of his life. Evoking George Harrison<\/a> on a morphine drip, \u201cHome\u201d finds him contemplating the places and people he\u2019s already left, how seeing them again would feel like finding a ghost whose sole purpose is to remind him of his failures. Each beat is another towering speedbump that DeMarco is willing himself over and beyond, forcing himself into the future.<\/p>\n

And DeMarco\u2019s songs about that future are what make Guitar so endearing, what makes it land like a long hug from an old friend you assumed you\u2019d never see again. \u201cSweeter\u201d seems like a catatonic bummer, a from-the-brink testimonial of someone who has supremely fucked up, repeatedly breaking a lover\u2019s heart until she vanished. But DeMarco\u2019s promise\u2014\u201cThis time, I will be sweeter\/I can be much sweeter\/Some things never change\u201d\u2014is so plainspoken and earnest that I find myself pulling for him like he\u2019s some hapless sports team, one play away from saving the franchise. He searches for his core on \u201cPunishment,\u201d a sort of secular prayer about trying to find the thing that animates you, the thing that can serve as a safeguard against your worst instincts. Plodding in a way that suggests a daily ritual, \u201cHoly\u201d is more direct still, a plea to be cut free from the \u201ccurse from down below.\u201d DeMarco can see the tether to his old ways starting to fray; just maybe it will finally snap.<\/p>\n

DeMarco\u2019s first album arrived the month I got engaged, his second a month or so before I turned 30 and got married. When his songs were daily reckonings with nights of excess, I was trying to get over inherited bacchanalian patterns of my own, to ease into some version of adulthood. His music made me feel like I was staring into some cracked rearview mirror. I get the sense from Guitar that DeMarco now knows what that\u2019s like, as one tries to leave the pernicious habits that extend from a lineage of addicts. But these songs\u2014soft lullabies and blues for himself about the hard places he\u2019s been\u2014make me think he\u2019s getting somewhere new by being honest and at least a little optimistic. \u201cAll those days of trying to run\/What a waste of breath,\u201d he sings at one point, like he\u2019s letting out a sigh he\u2019s suppressed for 35 years. Maybe no matter the struggle, you could still be a little like this version of Mac DeMarco, too.<\/p>\n

All products featured on Pitchfork are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission.<\/p>\n

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