She’s called at least one of the songs “a ballad in a graveyard,” but the charms of Rest are in the willingness to capture the many sides of grief-even in the worst times, sometimes you need to laugh, to dance. The producer SebastiAn-who you may know as the French guy talking about Facebook on Frank Ocean’s Blond(e)-gave much of the record an eerie lightness, informed by Gainsbourg’s affinity for weepy disco and the crisp neon of synthy horror scores. On one song she recounts the strange experience of seeing the body of a loved one, describing, in French “a face of wax,” and “bare leg jutting out from under a sheet.” But the best songs feel strangely uplifting too. Rest, the resulting record, gets pretty damn close, facing down despair with an unflinching pen, tackling both Kate’s passing as well her father’s (who died when she was 19) in gruesome detail. On her previous records she handed those duties to others, singing witty, bleak tracks written by people like Beck and Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker (incidentally, two descendants of her father’s drolly hilarious style.) But after the tragic death of her sister Kate Barry, Gainsbourg felt a compulsion to write her own lyrics, even if she couldn’t make them perfect. Leslie HornĪs the daughter of the man many consider to be the greatest French songwriter of all time, Charlotte Gainsbourg has always said she felt like she had too much to live up to as a songwriter. DeMarco is known for his wacky humor, but with This Old Dog, he’s shed some of the silliness and gotten a little more serious. But for all of the seriousness of the subject matter, thanks to its guitar melodies and wobbly distortions, This Old Dog sounds like something you’d want to listen to while looking at falling leaves on a fall day in rural Vermont. The album is a meditation on growing up, falling in and out of love, and coming to terms with his relationship with his father, who came back into his life following a cancer diagnosis (On “Watching Him Fade” he sings, “Even though we barely know each other, it still hurts watching him fade away”). “My Old Man” is a song about how, increasingly, DeMarco sees shades of father in himself, though his dad was an alcoholic who was mostly absent from his life. This Old Dog deals with some very real themes.
What does getting older sound like? What does reconciling relationships sound like? Well, in Mac DeMarco’s world, all of those milestones sound really, really chill, if a little sad.
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