Five Easy Hot Dogs – Mac DeMarco (2023)

The last we left Mac DeMarco was on 2019’s Here Comes The Cowboy, an album that is best compared to Bob Dylan’s Self-Portrait in its self-sabotaging, fatuitous attempts to push the limits of what its listeners will accept from its performing artist. Things could only go up from there – God help those who imagine the possibility of otherwise – and the four-year gap between that album and Five Easy Hot Dogs likely worked to the latter’s benefit in allowing for its predecessor’s languid aftertaste to fade from memory.

Almost as if with self-awareness of the low bar it had to clear, Five Easy Hot Dogs is obvious in its conceit: a series of instrumental tracks crafted during a cross-country roadtrip DeMarco took last year and named after the cities they were recorded in. It also strays little from the typical Mac DeMarco utility belt of songwriting: warbling guitar tones, groovy basslines, and quirky chord progressions and arpeggios to create relaxed, yet somber soundscapes. It is a sound so ubiquitous with the early-2010s rise in bedroom-recorded indie rock that these instrumentals often feel as if anyone with “Mac DeMarco guitar tone” in their Google search history could have recorded these songs, slapped DeMarco’s name on the cover, and no one would be the wiser. The naming convention only reinforces this fact with how impersonal the songs feel in relation to their namesakes – nothing about “Chicago” evokes the city it is named after (not that it stood a chance against Sufjan Stevens’s reigning champion from his Illinois album) and could have easily been recorded in Kalamazoo for all it matters.

What grounds these songs instead is the atmosphere of the road trip itself. Previous album aside, DeMarco has a penchant for finding simple yet moving words to go with his songs, making the sense of intention in releasing this purely instrumental album palpable. It is both a foot in the door for DeMarco’s return to the music industry beyond occasional Christmas covers and pointless demo compilations and a blank canvas for listeners to insert his sound into their daily lives. One need not imagine Edmonton while listening to either of the compositions named after it; any urban or rural landscape passing by will do. It is Mac DeMarco’s equivalent of a “lo-fi chill beats to study to” playlist: universally applicable, demanding nothing of its listener other than comfort. Recognizable indie musicians typically do not find themselves attempting to fill this niche, and it is obvious in retrospect that there is no one more qualified in this endeavor than DeMarco. Even when the music is at its most programmatic, it is never unpleasant. There are even occasional surprises of experimentation, such as how “Portland” sounds like a long-lost outtake from the soundtrack to the 1994 cult classic video game Earthbound with its playfully atonal synths and homey guitar strumming. None of the bolder musical steps come across as pretentious or hackneyed; Five Easy Hot Dogs never comes across as anything more than what it appears to be. If anything, it only disappoints in how its clear potential yearns for the contemplative, heartfelt lyrics DeMarco is known for in his best compositions – and, in doing so, sets up an imaginably burdensome expectation for the future.