listen to this and let me know what you think

Yeah, that's what makes it weird, but also kinda familiar. Its been a strange experience listening to this. I think you helped me figure it out, vintage (consumer?) mid-forward thing but modern at the same time? When I put a giant smiley face EQ over it, ok... this makes sense. I think the cover art is an EQ suggestion 

These two Mac DeMarco tunes don't sound like that. They sound like you'd expect.

Maybe I'm the least picky engineer in the world but this sounds fine to me. I've been listening to a lot of Captain Beefheart this week and it puts me in that general zone. I love that kind of punchy, raw but phat sound. I just started using condenser mics on my guitar amps as a regular thing and it's a big deal for me going forward. You can't fake it with an SM57.

I'm pretty firmly not a Mac fan but his production is usually quite good.

To put it another way, I'm usually more impressed with the production than I am with the music itself.

So if I'm going to criticize something it's the lack of memorable or effective lyrics or singing. When I listen I'm mentally tuning out the lead vocal and that's not a good thing.

Hi Don,

I should call you an van vliet "The Two Dons" it has kind of a gangster sounding vibe.

Trout Mask is absolute holy grail stuff for me.  Kind of mind expanding for me and it never seems to get tired.  There's just so much to chew on.

I agree about "Zig Zag Wanderer" almost has a beatlesy groove to it.  There's a lot of sleepers on those first few albums.

Agreed. But I can't think of any modern recordings that purposely sound crappy that grab me like vintage lo-fidelity but great music recordings do. 

I'm an old guy, and one of the first recordings I heard that grabbed me, for the beautifully warm (if not extended) bass was, "Wooly Bully" by Sam The Sham (And the Pharohs.) 

To my ear now many decades later, (and I'm imagining, not knowing,) someone mastered that single with a big helping of Pultec 100 Hz on the way to the disk cutter. And it soaked the bass and the bottom of the combo organ, while retaining the clarity of the vocal. Or maybe the studio did the magic. (The mastering guy's job was first to keep the stylus from jumping the groove!) The 45 just sounded hypnotic to this 13 yr old on my dad's mono hifi with a Wharfdale two-way 12" woofer speaker.

Each record sounded so different in those days, especially the odd one-hit wonder. One big attraction of the '60's British Invasion in retrospect, the English recording studios made records that sounded much different than the NY and LA studios did. To my young ear, it was less hi-fi than the best American recordings, but ballsier. I actually had the thought sometime not too much much later, did English studios then EQ pop records for crappier consumer record players than American studios did?

One of my favorite crappy recordings is the Seed's "Pushin' Too Hard." Awesome, can't get enough of it. Also, The Five Du-Tones' "Shake A Tailfeather" was early Motown, but totally awesome. When truly full range playback and CD's came in, I realized that one reason the bass was rolled off on "Tailfeather" is the low E string on the bass is noticeably flat on that recording. There was hardly any bottom on that record when you heard it on the radio. You heard the bass line melody but not the bottom, and the drums almost sounded like paper. Didn't matter, the song and energy were infectious. 

It didn't diminish my enjoyment of the song at all to hear the bass decades later and find out. The out-of-tune-ness just hits me like a doc's red mallet to the funny bone. Every time. Geez, I hope young people get to enjoy the rub of less-than-equal temperament tuning we're all resigned to in modern pop music. Instrument and vocal tuning is a big color on the artist's pallet.

He’s an entertainer, and he built a following. Here’s a video he’s in for another band

Not much difference.

Here we go again, splitting hairs!
Chris