Salad Days

It feels as if Canadian singer/songwriter Mac DeMarco watched those "yacht rock" parody videos and took them to heart. Few other artists, with his sense for the spaced-out and the absurd, base their attacks in mid-'70s AM radio pop while highlighting the more ersatz elements of the time. Yet DeMarco assembles breezy rhythm sections, cheesy keyboards, and studio-slick guitar lines as if they were the cutting edge of modern music. On a track like “Goodbye Weekend,” the deliberate slickness meets a deliberate trainwreck of mismatched chords for an unsettling mellowness, while other low-key rockers like “Blue Boy” and “Let Her Go” pass largely in benign harmony. “Let My Baby Stay” sounds like a demo tape somewhere between the experimental works of Robyn Hitchcock and John Lennon’s Bermuda demos. Cheesy keyboards dominate “Passing Out Pieces” and “Chamber of Reflection,” giving the tracks the sound of demos from several decades ago, with weird compression creating the sense that these tapes have been sitting somewhere for 40 years. It’s an intriguing set of songs where the presentation is as important as the content.