In fact, DeMarco isn't all that much of a gent in many senses of the word, though he's genteel enough to ply the front few zealots with copious slurps of his "Special Rrusurve" throughout. Irrefutably cheesier, saucier, and arguably sleazier than any Big Mac, the lanky, jaunty lo-fi guru slathers delectable throwback grooves over a venue the guts of which are tonight bloated with gratuitous Goo tees, NME hacks, and Ethan Kath, or Claudio Palmieri, or whoever he's purporting to be at this precise moment in time.
Torontonian Class A cartels and squat squadrons aside, DeMarco's is a rather more ingenuous appeal. His is a gap-toothed geek chic though as with any All Tomorrow's Parties acolyte, he throws the sort of merry carouse that'd intimate he ain't been bettin' on there even being a tomorrow forthcoming. Glasses spack and splinter on Birthdays' still freshly set concrete at ten second intervals, he's granted "permission to surf" and does so most pacifically; almost inertly – as though not so much surfing crests of adulation as skidding about a frosted glacier top – and drops the quintessential frat jam. Comprising doolally renditions of Enter Sandman, Blackbird, and Message In A Bottle amongst others (all doubtless abetted by that now hollow whisky bottle aforeswigged) it's both amusing to see Dalston so bemused, and an incontrovertibly audacious move for a UK début.
Though much of DeMarco's musical outpour is bold enough already: The Stars Keep On Calling My Name disguises a borderline mawkish sentimentality beyond a glistering patina of twinkly shoestring geetar, whilst Baby's Wearing Blue Jeans feels as rough 'n' rugged as raw denim. Though these go against the grain somewhat, for whilst Mac DeMarco 2 may have been a somewhat underexposed, and with that positively threadbare listen on LP it's here bundled into a dense knit: the tub-thumping, kitchen sink swoon to Cooking Up Something Good (a track quite unabashedly relaying times "when my dad smokin' meth"), an expressively raucous take on "rock song" and album standout Freaking Out The Neighbourhood that's met with freaked rarghs and other compulsions of primordial relish, and the scummy blues of My Kind of Woman come swilled, interwoven, and soused in still warm barf.
He's an unfathomably charismatic performer – my kind of man – and though the show is, as with his creative everything, very much entrenched in one particular tone Ode to Viceroy bucks the trend and lacerates the distressed denims. It's tonight tinged with an hitherto unprecedented menace; a smoky psych brood that's as moody as it is, once more, bluesy. A serenade to the abnormally fat (perhaps read phat, or even frat) fags he's been smoking outside, it's a violent mood swing condensed down into four minutes or so, the troupe's as yet jet-lagged guitars stumbling about as though bleary, sleep-deprived peepers succeeding in failing to digest the luminous headfuck that is Shibuya for a very first time. It curls gracefully, as though the bluish smoke emanating from a determined nicotine virgin's first morning cig: weird and in a way repellent at first, only to then mellow into a giddy wonderful.
However, it's Still Together – a tailor-made closer if ever there were one – that not only again bucks this aforementioned trend, but tonight kicks like a newly branded mule. It continues to recall The Tokens' The Lion Sleeps Tonight, but exudes a newfound roar in its belly as it finds a propulsive spring in its step: for the first time o' the night DeMarco shrugs off his slung strings, instead focussing his every attention on crooning like the finest cruise liner chansonnier never to have rocked and rolled upon the high seas.
British Airways brought them to us and although both the synthetic plastics masquerading as nondescript meat, and The Dark Knight Rises squinted at on a minuscule liquid crystal display might have disappointed, tonight this lip-smackin', finger-pickin' Big Mac did anything but.
