Mac DeMarco review – glowing melodies and shirtless antics at Carnegie Hall

More than 68 years after Leonard Bernstein’s first-ever Young People’s Concert, Carnegie Hall was yet again overrun with youthful energy on Sunday night. The occasion was the first of two sold-out performances from gap-toothed indie-pop scion Mac DeMarco, whose adoringly parasocial cross-genre fanbase has been one of the few in 2010s indie to continue an increasingly aged-down trajectory. There was many a parental chaperone next to their beaming teens, while a group of bright-eyed and bushy-tailed post-adolescents sitting behind me – having travelled all the way from Wisconsin for the occasion – audibly Googled: “Where to find Mac DeMarco after the concert” and quizzed each other on whether they’d lay a smooch on The 1975’s devilish frontman Matty Healy if given a chance.

“I can’t believe how fancy this place is for Mac,” one of them marveled – and it has indeed been a strange trajectory for DeMarco, who emerged from the shores of Vancouver in the early 2010s resembling a party-hardy modern-day Pigpen and with an aural suitcase stuffed with lovely guitar-warbles, stained with nicotine and carrying the faint stink of cheap brew. His early live sets were equally prone to Limp Bizkit covers and spontaneous audience makeout sessions; the 2014 docu-short Pepperoni Playboy was replete with scenes of new-indie-money dirtbag opulence, as DeMarco and his ragtag group drank champagne out of lobster shells and went cliff-diving amid a nonstop tour schedule.

But as with many aspects of popular culture, Covid represented a turning point for DeMarco’s career. Afforded with his first real sense of downtime in nine years, he sobered up (yes, cigs included) and receded from the public spotlight for several years, allowing his back catalogue to resonate virally and otherwise before returning to proper songcraft with last year’s fine-feathered Guitar. DeMarco’s 2020s output has often taken a prolific and largely subdued turn; his 2023 compilation One Wayne G ran nearly nine hours long, while this year saw the official release of four largely instrumental albums that radiated a mature, monastic beauty.

DeMarco has, undoubtedly and somewhat improbably, grown up – and in the moments before he and his band took Carnegie’s tony and iconic stage, it was certainly fair game to question whether he’d clean himself up further for such a serious-seeming venue. Fear not: DeMarco and co’s two-and-a-half-hour set was a spring-loaded outing for indie’s reigning court jester. There were thrills, spills and shirtless reveries in the form of a surprisingly radiant cover of Michael Jackson’s Human Nature (which fellow joking-not-joking provocateur-of-the-moment Nathan Fielder joined him onstage for in Los Angeles just several weeks ago). Mac may have settled down in regards to his personal life, but he’s more than happy – knowingly so, even – to continue playing the giddy fool, and the audience eats it up in kind.

Ironically, this current tour, an exhaustive and career-spanning showcase that even prompted its star to mock-apologize two-thirds of the way through, makes a very serious case for DeMarco as one of the 21st century’s most impressive and deeply felt pop songwriters. Aside from the ruminative melancholy that runs through even his most energetic tunes, the glowy guitar-and-keys fantasias contained within his catalog remain unmatched despite the legion of imitators, and Carnegie Hall proved the perfect venue for driving home his textural genius. The fat globs of melody that open Passing Out Pieces, from 2014’s breakthrough Salad Days, were practically hair-raising in their pronounced nature; a slowed-down take on the smoke-’em-if-you-got-’em tribute Ode to Viceroy (its tempo set to match the set’s more mellow midsection) was richer than a slice of tres leches with ice-cream on top.

With a collection of tunes like DeMarco’s, extended goofs and acrobatic stage antics are rendered unnecessary; nevertheless, during a beefed-up take on One Wayne G’s straight-and-simple love song I Like Her, the man of the hour reassembled a mic stand to function as a track-and-field hurdle, unsuccessfully clearing it and crashing to the ground. Several songs later, he stalked the back of Carnegie’s cavernous stage like an apex predator before returning to his mic-stand foe and, to much applause, clearing the jump with ease.

His stage banter was frequently delivered in a voice resembling late Hollywood spook-meister Vincent Price, and at one point he gave the microphone to an audience member to ask them how comfortable the seats were. (More comfortable than New York’s Radio City Music Hall, in case you were wondering.) Several songs – including the title track of his twilit 2017 masterpiece This Old Dog – were dedicated to his own canine pal, the improbably named Buck Naked DeMarco; later in the set, DeMarco rhapsodized on visions of “a trough filled with chopped cheese meat” and, strikingly, engaged in some quasi-Oedipal reflection mirroring the plight his millennial cohort perpetually faces: “I wish to be a small crying baby, to crawl back into the mother … to be born, again.”

There persists the question as to whether DeMarco’s unabashed onstage silliness has kept him at arm’s length from being taken seriously by more discerning music listeners. But, for now, his fans are still making their voices heard when it comes to what they expect from him, in a very literal sense. “Do a flip!” a male concertgoer in the orchestra seats hollered during a quiet moment; “Do you think I’m able to do a flip?” DeMarco seriously asked, before performing a perfect cartwheel to a rapturous reception. “I want to be your pig,” he gamely grunted after catching his breath. Fair enough.