Edmonton-raised Vancouver-based Mac DeMarco made the pages of many a blog buzz with his debut tape – and by this we mean actual cassette, retro fans – under the none-more-contrivedly-cool name Makeout Videotape. He went on to cause something of an alcohol-sodden splash on tour with fellow Canadians, two-piece firebrands Japandroids, along the way terming his own music “jizz-jazz” and most recently reverting to his given name and causing a smile to rise across the hipsters’ collective roll-up-stained teeth with the drugged out madness of the video for his 7” ‘Only You’.

It’s not a new thing to see definitively underground artists use the trappings of pop to subvert both the alternative and the mainstream – think Peaches and maybe Patrick Wolf to an extent. DeMarco has, over these 11 tracks, done it with considerably more aplomb, humour and entertainment value than one has a right to expect from what are so often cerebral exercises in audience manipulation.

Sitting comfortably as the newest addition to the roster of Captured Tracks, home to many the revivalist act, DeMarco marks himself out from the pack by celebrating what can only be described as an imagined, half-dreamed style of the ‘80s via the ‘50s that he himself has created.

Take ‘Baby’s Wearing Blue Jeans’ , the tale of “A fine lookin’ woman/In a pair of jeans” that’s as amusing as it is lascivious and shares, along with nearly all the tracks here, a repetitive, high-toned rockabilly guitar line that somehow makes it as addictive as crack and candy. A catchy-as-hell bit of snarl-lipped sexuality, with the past revered unrealistically: “Stay with me forever/Don’t take off those jeans” he warbles. It lands firmly between the actual sounds of Sun Studios and the way those sounds were ruined on the soundtracks of so many teen movies.

‘I’m A Man’ pushes the overstatement further, a Velvet Underground-gone-macho ode to heterosexuality with a collapsing disco beat and the album microcosm lyric “Creeping around up and down town/Got the late night shift, rollin’ up like this”. There’s an unmistakable whiff of The Cramps (themselves crazed on sentimentalism and debauchery in equal measure) here, and it’s a welcome scent.

For the most part though we’re dealing with great tunes like the title track, boasting a very basic electro-acoustic riff while that high geetar rings and DeMarco sleazes out an invitation to join him at the titular den of iniquity – it’s an atmospheric 1980s Robbie Robertson song with the early rock ‘n’ roll embellishments of pulsing hi-hats and simplistic, primal instrumentation.

Strangely, in the second and weaker half of the album you could be forgiven for thinking that any number of Flying Nun bands had suddenly taken an interest in filthy sex and pelted out half-DIY indie, half Jerry Lee Lewis numbers like the warped ‘She’s Really All I Need’ and the parallel-universe novelty hit ‘Move Like Mike’ – perhaps the silliest, cheekiest tune on the record.

There are a couple of duff notes hit – when he goes for sincerity, as on ‘One More Tear to Cry’, it’s hard to buy into for obvious reasons and closer ‘Me and Mine’, like its title, sounds like a Macca outtake (shudder). The radio station idents, too, while adding a little Parisian/Hollywood Tarantino cool are an indulgence at best.

Yet this is a really cool, engaging record. The enduring image is perhaps that conjured by ‘European Vegas’ – he’s some kinda transsexual Ferris Bueller, taking a night instead of a day off, and in place of singing ‘Twist and Shout’ at a parade he’s screaming an old Roxy Music song at some filthy little no-name club, a ferocious, knowing grin on his make-up smeared face. Winner.