mvm.

DeMarco releases 199 songs, which is 9 and a half hours of new music. No, you heard that right.

I vaguely listening to DeMarco and his work before. Cast your mind back to the start of this year where we fell into the rabbit hole of Five Easy Hot Dogs, Mac’s second instrumental. Here’s what I had to say about it:

A fitting backdrop to picking up your latte; the clean-lined, lo-fi minimalist approach is actually a direct pledge DeMarco made “not go home to Los Angeles until I was done with a record,” on a spontaneous solo road trip. Much like the undulating loiter of endless road passages, Five Easy Hot Dogs is a stagnant repository of creating an album for the sake of creating, just because well, you can. Despite it’s feedback as a vein of something else, Hot Dogs is a surprising easy-listen. Carried through the spidery acoustics of Portland 2, interlaced with the hip guava of Chicago, it embraces inner cities as it maps out a sound bite for each. Much like the opposite end-goal of an American road trip, it’s not something to get lost in.

Not something well regarded as an album – simply because it feels like sounds to fill empty space – imagine my surprise when I found out that he had come out with another sterile hot take of instrumental work. This time, he has seemingly released 199 (yes, 199) outtakes and demo tracks he’s ever bothered of writing down.

Hold music for a nursing home, One Wayne G is not going to be on my spins anytime soon. There’s better music to put on in the background that this lazy piece of work.

At least Five Easy Hot Dogs has a defined ending with distinct features between one song to the next. I think even the most bonafide of fans are going to have difficulty differentiating between track 23 (beautifully titled 20190723) and track 163 (titled 20220202 2).

A rarity among mvm as I don’t often like to spread negativity when it’s someone’s creativity that’s getting hacksawed but, this is an extreme exception.