Unhinged Goon/ Radical Loon. Mac DeMarco, Mac DeMarco 2.

I ain't goin' go judge no record by its goddarn cover, but Montréal scamp Mac DeMarco here simultaneously looks like the sort of goon your mom advises you best avoid and the type of loon you find yourself helplessly allured to. Fitting, therefore, that Mac DeMarco 2 (this is actually, counterintuitively, DeMarco's début full-length, although it soon becomes apparent that the droll and jocular are the young pawnshop geetar slinger's preferred character adjectives) be an endearing marriage of the dirty and the dear that, ultimately, enchants more than DeMarco may in sordid adolescent reverie.

The LP begins with a track appositely entitled Cooking Up Something Good. Spindly, yet still sprightly guitars are spun out over plashes of softened cymbal, DeMarco's purposefully lackadaisical vocals drifting in and out of focus like wafts of pie emanating outta wholly intentionally open window. It's lower than lo-fi, and its jittery strings recall those of the mercifully now defunct Vincent Vincent and the Villains but DeMarco's sardonic lyricisms of ballet bros and dads down in basements rustle up a fervent hunger for all things further.

Dreaming begins amid a puff of vintage guitar and a plume of zaftig bass – oneiric doesn't quite cover it. Nor, indeed, does the fluffy, yet malodorous blanket term vintage. For Dreaming sets DeMarco apart as the long overdue sonic counterpart to Patsy Cline. Had death not done us part, she'd now be eighty. Conversely, DeMarco is but twenty-two, thus rendering his wistful elegia all the more impressive. These are the sorts of songs to evoke memories of times never personally inhabited – as a photograph may – so expertly crafted are they that they engender an unfounded nostalgia for, say, detention. In many instances ingenious, they are thus primarily as they dreamily encapsulate the ingenuousness of youth.

The slippery guitars and jaw-on-the-floor slacker daze of The Stars Keep On Calling My Name is one such exemplar, as are the gooey, saccharine blues of Connan Mockasin-alike, Annie. And throughout, it's fairly apparent that DeMarco's a gentleman with a penchant for the ladies. The prissy Robson Girl who sits down by her daddy, perpetually turning a cold shoulder on the lusting DeMarco snookers his insatiable thirst, as does the she in question on the swoonsome My Kind of Woman. Snide remarks this time exchanged for a persistent charm offensive and subsequent pleading ("And I'm down on my hands and knees, begging you please, baby/ To show me your world" he candidly admits) it's a quite sublime doting lullaby and, more pertinently still, proof that chivalry still subsists, if only just.

Mac shuffles what is, by and large, a fairly single-suited pack for the segueing Boe Zaah – an instrumental bumble of hillbilly acoustics and rhythms what roll like astray tumbleweed, before lassoing his somewhat lazy, yet with that luscious vocals back in on Sherrill. I'm less sure that's a girl's name, although it's no less winsome than owt else on Mac DeMarco 2 as its author again relays his personable reliability. "So if you go/ Don't cry/ I'll be right there/ At your side", he avows atop a thoroughly wondrously composed chorus. However, DeMarco really knows how to climax as Still Together – equal parts Elliott Smith on a better day and The Tokens' The Lion Sleeps Tonight – illustrates the man at his most exposed. And, flourishing within a lo-fi field which naturally tends to breed a rather generic disaffection, DeMarco has grown to excel. It tails off into him awaking the indeterminate "Kiki" and imploring they slump off elsewhere. "Oh, you have a little indentation from the glasses that you feel asleep in" goes he, to a point smudging his freshly laid tracks – the allegorical contents of his heart trailed out across tape newly churned – with an almost satirical inanity. As such, humour meets lovelorn humility; the gentle lunacy of, like, Dent May meets the overtly likeable.

Oh, and in Freaking Out The Neighborhood DeMarco has just about the most loveable single of the year thus far.

Thus in channeling the then of the '90s – Demarco's formative decade – Mac conjures a sound that is undeniably now. Contemporary brilliance has already been achieved; it's now merely a case of where to next. Then we'll really see whether he's more unhinged goon, or truly radical loon.