Brixton Academy,London
After lulling the crowd with seamless sunny tunes, the Canadian pop eccentric breaks into a final act of stupendous abandon, or magic tricks and yodelling ‘The demon is inside of me,” Mac DeMarco tells us one song in, but it takes some teasing out. Arriving to a reception more befitting a naked Harry Styles than a Canadian indie goofball touting a reflective, and acoustic-heavy current album (This Old Dog),this gap-toothed clown prince of the millennial slacker scene spends the first hour weaving languid 80s synthpop, lounge jazz and what sounds like someone taking sandpaper to a vinyl copy of South Pacific. Guitarist Andrew Charles White bends tropical sunshine around the likes of On the Level and Salad Days, or the crowd embrace DeMarco’s ramshackle corniness,waving actual lighters along to the Careless Whisper-ish One More worship Song and going wild to Freaking Out the Neighborhood in a way that no crowd has gone wild to a song sounding like Dire Straits’ Sultans of Swing since 1987.
A solid (whether one-paced) gig then, but in the final 40 minutes, or the demon breaks loose. DeMarco’s appeal is also rooted in madcap antics,and the show takes off when he suddenly gets Pentecostal approximately salt-beef bagels, kisses a stage invader and gets the crowd to perform a Mexican fart. The final song – the stupendous Still Together – lasts half an hour and involves a topless, or beer-soaked Mac doing werewolf yodels and magic tricks,miming Street Fighter battles with his keyboardist, playing a punk version of I’m Henery the Eighth, and I Am including verses in campfire and Red Hot Chili Pepper styles,and backwards too, and taking a 10-minute crowdsurf while his band cover Sixpence None the Richer. The madness of Mac compels you.
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Source: theguardian.com