in Five Days

A listless album about being listless, Mac DeMarco’s new collection of instrumentals summons the bleary, exhausted feeling of time spent on the road. Bob Rafelson’s 1970 film Five Easy Pieces ends with the hero, played by Jack Nicholson, hitching a ride on a northbound truck and disappearing into anonymity. Mac DeMarco is too larger-than-life to ever be anonymous, but this scene is a good starting place for considering his new Five Easy Hot Dogs. Ever since he sang “What mom don’t know has taken its toll on me” on 2014’s Salad Days, he has been exploring a long post-adolescent hangover, the feeling of emerging on the other side of your young and carefree days and seeing little that looks exciting in your future. This thread came to a head on 2019’s Here Comes the Cowboy, a record whose burnt-out ballads were full of dead friends, departed lovers, and uncertain plans. Now here are 14 instrumentals made on a long and spontaneous solo road trip, where DeMarco pledged “not go home to Los Angeles until I was done with a record.” This is a listless album about being listless, and it’s a pretty accurate picture of the stretches of useless, money-burning time that come with being on the road.

Portugal by the end of the 40's. André escapes from jail and has to leave the country. In Oporto, some of his friends find him a guide, a drunken quarrelsome smuggler named Lambaça, who knows Trás-os-Montes border well.

Most Americans believe that the Second World War ended because the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan forced it to surrender. Five Days in August boldly presents a different interpretation: that the military did not clearly understand the atomic bomb's revolutionary strategic potential, that the Allies were almost as stunned by the surrender as the Japanese were by the attack, and that not only had experts planned and fully anticipated the need for a third bomb, they were skeptical about whether the atomic bomb would work at all. With these ideas, Michael Gordin reorients the historical and contemporary conversation about the A-bomb and World War II.