Rock City gives you a Meredith Gift

Not the shyest of individuals, Mac DeMarco likes to rock out with his …yes, you know the one.

Canada’s goofball, over-achieving slacker-core overlord and his equally loose and lucid band will be playing Meredith Music Festival on Saturday and hanging around for Sunday bloody (Mary) Sunday.
Rock City fills him on the stringent rules governing the nude running race in the round, the Meredith Gift: all competitors must be nude or underpanted, all dogs must be underpanted and any competitor wearing Lycra will be set on fire.
“How strange! Yeah, me and my band will probably go in the race on Sunday, sure, why not?” the 23 year old says. QUOTE HIM!

Following their Rock And Roll Nightclub EP, Mac DeMarco’s 2 album is pretty much the Supernatural Amphitheatre’s vibe incarnate. Highbrow meets lowbrow, hi-fi versus lo-fi, high guy slaps low five.

“The Melvins should be great and did you say Courtney Love was playing?” Courtney Barnett! She’s playing just before you guys, a transatlantic peer of sorts. “Oh cool.”

Lyrically, DeMarco covers a lot of territory in his songs, singing about true love, the creeping sense of ennui, employment versus unemployment, juvenile delinquency and emerging from a town like Edmonton in Canada to move south to the ‘States. “I just write about personal experience. Not everything you do in your life is hunky dory.”

Cooking Up Something Good is a case in point, juxtaposing light and dark together without pitting them each against each other. “I was looking for a chord change for the chorus and that weird dissonant chord halftone seemed to fit. I liked how it had that rinky dinky funny sounding verse then all of a sudden it switches over to something a little bit more sinister, I don’t know. To me it was entertaining, I’m glad other people pick up on that,” he says, a spittley lisp coming through every now and then.

The Stars Keep On Calling My Name picks a more uncomfortable subject. “One of our friends from back home in Edmonton committed suicide and for some reason that phrase came to me while I was sitting at home in my living room playing guitar. The songs whimsical and doesn’t really relate to that at all but it’s written around that…and it’s also about my sweetie pie Kiera. I always wanted to move to the US and now here I am and now here she is.”

DeMarco honoured his sweetheart Kiera at the Pitchfork Music Festival this year. Witness his high croon, he’s able to mix it with big boys like Roy Orbison and Chris Isaak.

WARNING: You may feel all the emotions when KiKi comes out on stage all bashful-like.

The gap-toothed grin machine has played plenty of shows and now he knows how to move crowds around like putty in his grimy, string-blistered hands. “The more comfortable me and my friends get on giant stages the weirder stuff is gonna come out,” he says as you think ‘This bodes well for Meredith!’ to yourself. “With audiences in Europe we were flat out lying to them and telling them one of the band members just found out he was going to have a baby and everyone was going completely mad. I’m not necessarily trying to freak people out, I just wanna f— with them and be funny,” he says. Brother doesn’t mind getting airbo(u)rne either.

“If I’m having a good show I’ll climb around the venue. That depends on how limber I’m feeling. There were a couple of times recently where I nearly fell 12 feet.”

In a time where the blogosphere moves at 130 clicks per minute, wise heads like Michael Gudinski warn artists about how important it is to build your career because it can be gone next week if a bit of TLC isn’t applied. The faster you rise…the faster you can fall way more than 12 feet. DeMarco has gone from living in closets only a couple of years ago (more on that in a tick) to doing alright for himself so he knows what’s up.

“The first show we ever played in London it was sold out three weeks in advance and that had never happened and I was like ‘What the hell is going on?’ All these kids!’ That place wasn’t even that big, like 300 people; the next time we go it was fully sold out like an 800 person venue, completely ridiculous. It’s pretty weird every time…very weird every time.”

As for that closet business, DeMarco spent a fair bit of time living in one. Talk about sacrificing sleep for your art. Talk turns to Canada’s Polaris Prize which he was longlisted for.
“I don’t care about the Polaris Prize. They just give it to the huge Canadian superstars over here. Like Feist needs another $ 30,000! Oh Arcade Fire got another $ 30,000? I guess they can go and get gold teeth now,” he says.

“Canada’s completely backwards with that kind of stuff, they have a reputation for really great arts funding but they only give it to people who are at a certain level. Take me for instance, I’m starting to get to a point where I’m eligible but I’ve gotten this far on my own. The guarantees are only going out, I don’t need your help now, I needed it four years ago, living in a closet and trying to put records out on my own. I don’t give a shit about the Polaris. Even if I was shortlisted I probably wouldn’t have gone.”

Any extravagant moments then? “I’m not making a huge amount of money. It’s probably the equivalent of working a fulltime job. All I have to do is get on stage for 45 minutes and then it’s like ‘Have all this cash!’ As the guarantees start going up and you start getting more popular the money starts getting spread out between all these people. Turns out you don’t actually make that much. My main motto is if I start making more money I’ll still keep living like a piece of sh-t. Who wants to have money? I like living like a piece of sh-t,” he says.

Ultimately, “I’d love to have a ranch and a big yard where I can play the drums outside. But I’m 23 and I’m a little sh-tstain…maybe when I’m 40. That’s dreaming large.”

It may happen for him, who knows, Weezer went from playing in their garage to worldwide success quite quickly. DeMarco is a known Weezer fan, “I love the Blue Album so much. I listen to In The Garage. The Sweater Song and Surf Wax America.”

Mac and co aren’t shy when it comes to covering songs live too, having touched up Limp Bizkit, JJ Cale and a certain apocalypse-loving LA band. “We cover Schism, my guitarist was a huge Tool fan in junior high…I don’t really know anything about Tool. When we play that Tool song in Europe a lot of people don’t get it. But then in America when we do it, kids are like ‘What? They’re playing a Tool song, this is so crazy!!’ he says, adopting the voice of the zit-faced, crackly-voiced, My-girlfriend-would-kill-me-if-I-had-a-girlfriend Simpsons character.

Back to Weezer, this is a sexy party and you may lose your sweater.

 

Mac Demarco – The Sweater Song (Weezer cover) from Ian Shanahan on Vimeo.

“They faded away from me for a while when I was in junior high school all the older kids got into ’90s indie rock. I wanted to be this cool guy or whatever. Then when I was living back in Edmonton a few years ago with a buddy all we’d listen to is Weezer, very cool. I’ve never seen them play,” he says guiltily.

“This kid I knew growing up named Dan McRae and he was a neighbourhood kid I used to hang out with and I’d go to him and he’d say, [adopts cool pubescent tone of a proselytizing kid who wears Stussy pants and Vision Streetwear shoes] ‘Yo check this band out man, they’re called…The Pixies.’ At one point he was really into Weezer so then I got into Weezer.”

As for new stuff, DeMarco spruiks “My friends who play in this band Salvia Plath. The guy Mike who is Run DMT has a new single out, I think they’re called The Doobie Sisters. It’s gonna be hot! I could list millions of bands, who knows if any of them will ever be super famous.”

DeMarco and band will play at the super deluxe Shadow Electric venue supported by ScotDrakula and Jesse Davidson and a Walter TV show has just been announced for the Sunday evening post-Meredith come-up. Walter TV is the Mac DeMarco line-up shuffled around and they’ll play “shaggy, psych-tinged afro-pop and jumpy folk hymns.”

To win one of two double passes to see Mac DeMarco at Shadow Electric, email michael.cahill@news.com.au with the subject heading FORGET DYLAN, DEMARCO GOES ELECTRIC.

Meredith Music Festival, Supernatural Amphitheatre, Dec 14-16, www.mmf.net.au; The Tote, 71 Johnston St, Collingwood, Dec 15, www.thetotehotel.com; Shadow Electric, 1 St Heliers St, Abbotsford. Mon, 8pm. www.shadowelectric.com.au

Jen Feeling Zen
Since “collaborating” with the aforementioned Barnett, Jen Cloher sounds revitalized. The clip for her new song Hold My Hand is shot on Bethell’s Beach in New Zealand starring acclaimed Kiwi actor and national treasure Ian Mune.

Hold My Hand is a neat reminder of the breadth of her Australian Music Prize longlisted album In Blood Memory.

It’s a damn good chance to make the shortlist.

This segues into telling you, inquisitive reader, about the 14 albums that have just been added to the longlist: All Day Venus by Adalita, Dream Cave by Cloud Control, Step Brothers by The Palms, Harlequin Dream by Boy and Bear, Flu Season by Fluent Form, Howlin’ by Jagwar Ma, The Beginning And The End Of Everything by Josh Pyke, The Bright Door by Machine Translations, Conversations With Ghosts by Paul Kelly, The Still And The Steep by Heath Cullen, Phoenix by Jimblah, Golden by Jimmy Tait, Beloved by New Gods and The Night Deeds Are Vapour by Ross McClennan. The Shortlist is decided next week, the winner will be announced in March and receive the kudos plus $ 30,000.
SCOOP: The shortlist will be announced at the inaugural Coopers’ Australian Music Prize concert on Australia Day at Sidney Myer Music Bowl.
It’ll be free too!
New look website right here:

www.thecoopersamp.com.au

Not Noise Pollution
The Bendigo Hotel in Collingwood is being taken by The Yarra Council to the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal to stop live music at the venue. This must be stopped! Sign the petition, you doth protest.

UPDATE from Cr Jackie Fristacky, Mayor. “Yarra has some of the country’s best known live music venues, something Council is proud of and does not take for granted.  We appreciate the value of smaller venues like the Bendigo for giving bands a platform to develop and to add to the vibrancy of Yarra’s music culture. That is why Council established the Leaps and Bounds live music festival involving local Yarra venues, with a highly successful inauguration of the Festival in June this year."

"Unfortunately, we have a situation where some bands at the Bendigo Hotel have been loud enough to draw complaints. The complaints (14 in total) have been made by a few different people over the course of the past 12 months. The matter was listed for a VCAT hearing on Tuesday (26th November); however following a meeting of several Councillors, senior officers and the Bendigo’s management, we came to an agreement that we would continue to work together towards a solution."
 

"The VCAT hearing did not go ahead but was adjourned to enable the above process to be progressed to avoid the need for any VCAT intervention. A second meeting was held this morning with Councillors, senior officers, the Hotel’s management and sound experts to continue working towards a resolution which would enable the matter to be withdrawn from VCAT.” 

Well played, everybody!

www.chn.ge/IrFfbl

Chinn Up
Rock City had the pleasure of working with Big Damo aka Damian Chinn, back in the day at Gaslight Records.

One night at a Chemical Brothers concert there was a chance to meet the reclusive duo after the show when some rather friendly girls sitting next to your scribe said they had an in. Walking outside after the show and about to go and grip and grin with Ed and Tom, Big Damo appeared on the steps of Festival Hall, three sheets to the wind but still with his sh-t together. As soon as our eyes locked the thought of being a Chem Bros fanboy disappeared, the chickenhead girls wandered off backstage – a little bemused – and Damo and your scribe went and had a beer and a jaw. It just made more sense.

It was a real moment.

The dreaded black dog finally got the better of Damo a few weeks back and this Sunday there is a memoriam gig called Nevermind the Bollocks at Yah Yah’s.

The bill is fitting for a man with a heart the size of Wilsons Prom.
See The Damo Allstars, Even, Tim Rogers, Spencer P Jones and The Escape Committee, Davey Lane, Henry Wagons, Joel Silbersher, Chris Russell’s Chickenwalk, Charles Jenkins and The Zhivagos, The Spazzys, The Chrome Nips, King Parrot, Jemma & Her Ambitious Young Men, Van and Cal Walker, Them Nights, Gruntbucket, Crystal Thomas, Nick Fraser Plus DJs Melvis, Stickman, Lorena Nah, Chenz And Dr Ludwig.
All money raised goes to Mind Australia, which provides community mental health services to the community through encouraging independent, productive and purposeful lives.

Yah Yah’s, 99 Smith ST, Collingwood. Sun, 2pm. $ 15.

It’s a Push Over
The Push and Triple J have announced the line-up for Push Over and it’s nicely varied: All Day, Bam Bam, Buried in Verona, Chance Waters, Citizen Kay, Cub Sport, Deez Nuts, Dream On Dreamer, In Hearts Wake, Johnny Third, Lucianblomkamp, Make Them Suffer, Outright, PEZ, Remi, Saviour, Sierra, The Bennies and The Smith Street Band.
Brunswick’s hip hop soul searchers Remi have really hit their stride recently appearing at the Music Victoria Awards and killing it on Triple J’s Like A Version too.

Sidney Myer Music Bowl. March 10. $ 45+bf. www.thepush.com.au

Better than Evie
Not content with putting on Boogie, the most raved about Victorian festival since Meredith began, Bruzzy’s Farm is hosting New Years Evie. See what they did there.

If a giant slip n slide doesn’t entice you then how about the bands playing: Stax On Soul Revue Band, Harmony, Stella Angelico, Toga Rock, The Electric Guitars, Three Kings, Little Desert, Jemma & Her Wise Ambitious Young Men, IO, Blown Cones with DJs LA Pocock, Sweet Jelly Roll, Larry Kronick Jr, Sabo and Roller One and more to be announced.

They sell it noicely: This is not a fantasy land. This place is real…and it’s yours. It’s the caring and generous, nurturing, nourishing, intimate bosom of New Years Evie at Bruzzy’s Farm in Tallarook. Let your hair hang down this New Years Evie.”

Bruzzy’s Farm, Tallarook, Dec 31-Jan 2. $ 99+bf, 15 years and up, $ 44 8-15 years and kids under 8 free. www.newsyearsevie.com

8 Music Videos Including That Hil.Aire Franco and Rogen Joint

Northern Lights – DZ Deathrays
Best bit: Sensory overload rock-out at 2.32.
Weird bit: Big Ben on a bender.
Earworm bit: The guitar lead palette cleanser after the chorus gets repeated waaay too many times.

Noodle Soup – Thundamentals
Best bit: The bovine and beef spitting and the glitchy hook Warp-style percussive sample. Certified BANGER!
Weird bit: The bikie catching Red Eye Fight at 1.40.
Earworm bit: “Roll it up, roll it up.”

Happy Ending – Alex Cameron
Best bit: Dayne Rathbone creepy-nerd gyrating at 2.56.
Weird bit: Not much happens. Bit of a letdown.
Earworm bit: “Let’s go to Chinatown, that’s where I’ll find my happy ending.”

Time – Sures
Best bit: Slow motion beekeeper strut.
Weird bit: Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em at 2.20.
Earworm bit: Not much of it. Not much of a song really. Grow some cojones.

Midnight Mass (At The Market Street Payphone) – Pond
Best bit: Dude with quivering lip at 3.36.
Weird bit: Nick Allbrook taking oxygen.
Earworm bit: Plaintive guitar and space-hum reverberation.

After Antique – WiLSON
Best bit: The whole interstellar flight of fancy mise en scene is quite nourishing.
Weird bit: The lyrics coming up on the screen in phat Times New Roman font.
Earworm bit: “Where there’s love it’s got to be found, that’s the principle.”

Quasimodo’s’ Dream – Tim Rogers covering The Reels
Best bit: Soul arch, Triple-R-stage-at-Big-Day-Out-jump-from-roof circa 1998 at 2.20.
Weird bit: It’s all quite weird. Weird good that is.
Earworm bit: “Find another me.”

 

Bound 3 (Vague) – Seth Rogen and James Franco
Best bit: All of it. Especially the macking and Rogen’s blinking.
Weird bit: The way Seth has been tweeting at Kim like they’re all BFFs. EFF that, let the spoof (titter) speak for itself.
Earworm bit: “Ah ha honey.”

 You on Twitter? A’course you are. Follow me and I’ll follow you www.twitter.com/joeylightbulb

 

 

www.news.com.au/entertainment/music