Freelove Fenner - "Mary". Is it wrong to call Freelove Fenner's guitar-lines "cartographic"? Does it make sense? Maybe it's just me who hears these trills and reversals as twisting roads, corners on a map, the thrust and parry of royal blue highways. A Freelove Fenner song feels like a neighbourhood, a city flattened out and populated; there's a topography, hills and valleys, furrows for rain to follow.

Maybe I'm alone in my synesthesia. Maybe, for you, "Mary"'s blues and reds are metaphors. Maybe you hear no winding lines, see no knots. But when I say this song is loose, does that compute? When I say it is loose and also tight? Montreal's Freelove Fenner are extraordinary architects of sonic space - their songs are filled with neat little figures, perfect and separate, or interlocking. They are stubbornly sweet-and-sour. Their sentiments are obtuse. Do Not Affect A Breezy Manner reminds me of Mary Timony's Helium, Let's Active, and Young Marble Giants, but never of other people's records - just the memory of their sound.

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