The loping “Blue Boy”, which shares its title with an indie-pop classic by Orange Juice, amiably advises against acting so tough and worrying so much about your haircut. There’s little here to justify DeMarco’s reputation for divisiveness (“Detractors,” as Steven Hyden put it for Wondering Sound, “tend to regard him as some kind of bullshit artist, a quintessential hipster doofus slumming it under the ironic guise of a hippie dirtbag who gleefully covers Limp Bizkit in concert”). For all its internal contradictions, Salad Days is no more or less than a great album in a tradition of no-big-deal great albums.
His second full-length, Salad Days, isn’t a departure from its predecessor so much as a richer, increasingly assured refinement. Whichever Mac is the better-behaved one has been taking over more and more, as the creepy detours of 2012’s Rock and Roll Night Club EP gave way to the more direct 2. The fact DeMarco isn’t even his real name-he was born Vernor Winfield McBriare Smith IV-captures the duality almost too perfectly. You can’t read about him without seeing the word “slacker,” but in two short years, he’s gone from opening at New York’s 550-capacity Bowery Ballroom to headlining at the 1,500-capacity Webster Hall (could he have done better if he’d tried?). He’s the guy everybody assumes is a stoner, though he claims he never, as they say, touches the stuff. He’s the gap-toothed prankster who sings the sighing love ballad. This alluring ambivalence is one of DeMarco’s defining traits.