Five Easy Hot Dogs

It does not at all feel lazy, rather a conscious effort to do something new. Five Easy Hot Dogs is an incredibly addictive record that entices with its lightheartedness and almost weightlessness, which is aided by the absence of vocals and lyrics.

While perhaps not the return to bigger records that fans of Salad Days might have hoped for, Five Easy Hot Dogs stays true to the linear, if unexpected, evolution of Mac DeMarco’s music. Each iteration is somehow even more sparse and experimental; it seems this record is the result of DeMarco slowly whittling down his sound until it is just its own essential core.

Each instrumental, named after its place of origin, floats by languorously and begins to blur together into a gentle, placid paste not even three songs in. Each track is gorgeous, but they’re all also immeasurably passive, with only a few key differences between each to make them separate entities.

Though each track is named for where it was recorded, there’s not much to distinguish one stop from another, and though you could connect the locations into a journey, these tracks don’t form an arc but play as if stacked atop one another.

‘Five Easy Hot Dogs’ isn’t going to win DeMarco any more fans, nor will it distract from his past triumphs. ... This instrumental offering will, like most of his tunes, act as great company for those who just wanna lay back and disconnect from it all.