Brendan Canning

What would you do if your bandmate put out a solo record and made you look like a lazy sod?
Would you a): tour the world with him to support his record, and between European and American runs, score a little art-house film by Bruce McDonald and starring Ellen Page? OR... Maybe you’d opt for plan b): squirrel yourself away in a studio around the corner with your neighbour, get comfortable, and write your own record utilizing the bits and bobs you collect off good friends who pass through and lend a hand? And, all the while, you bust your ass to help keep your soccer team in the premier division and still make it home by 7 every night to cook your girlfriend dinner?
But Brendan Canning didn’t earn the nickname The Champ for nothing — he chose both options. And, he still DJed the odd party when asked. And, starred in an upcoming Bruce McDonald documentary about his life and career.
In January 2007, Canning — one half of the creative partnership that blossomed into Broken Social Scene — decided to make the most of the new year and began writing what would become the second offering from the “Broken Social Scene Presents” series, following the September 2007 release of fellow BSS co-founder Kevin Drew’s Spirit If…
Anyone who’s seen Broken Social Scene live over the past seven years had an idea of what to expect from Drew’s album — after all, he voices the majority of BSS’ euphoric anthems and bruised ballads, and also tends to dominate the stage banter. But with Canning — the cornerstone of the band’s rhythmic foundation — there’s less empirical evidence with which to form expectations. To date, he’s only taken the lead on three BSS songs, each of them very drastically different from each other: the clap-happy cacophony of “Stars and Sons” (from 2002’s You Forgot It In People), the free ’n’ easy west-coast cruiser “Handjobs for the Holidays” (a respite from the simmering tension of 2005’s Broken Social Scene) and the understated psychedelic piano serenade “Market Fresh” (a 2003 B-side).
“Something for all of us…” thus presents Canning with an opportunity to both reintroduce and reinvent himself. Some songs provide an immediate sense of comfort and familiarity: “Chameleon,” with its slow-building, time-lapsed ecstatic release, sounds just like the sort of brass-blasted ambient bliss BSS were coming up with regularly on the Ted’s Wrecking Yard stage back in 2001; and after all these years of Drew and Canning working together, the insta-anthem “Churches Under the Stairs” provides the very first occasion for them to share a duet. But the music on “Something for all of us…” is as much of a reflection of Canning’s life outside BSS as within. Though the album features the expected assemblage of BSS buds (including Drew, drummer Justin Peroff, Jimmy Shaw on horns, and Lisa Lobsinger on vocals), the bulk of “Something for all of us…” was written and recorded with relative newcomers — and next-door neighbours — Ryan Kondrat and John la Magna. Its 11 tracks are informed equally by Canning’s time spent as a Sonic Youth/Dinosaur Jr.-worshipping indie-rocker in the early ’90s (see: the fuzz-covered opening title track, “Hit the Wall”), an active Toronto disco/house DJ (the spiky cowbell funk of “Love Is New”) and a bedroom electronic producer (the glitch-tronic instrumental “All the Best Wooden Toys Come From Germany”). But the album also exposes heretofore unheard Champ-ian sounds: “Snowballs & Icicles” is an uncharacteristically stark and vulnerable acoustic elegy that sounds like it slipped out of John Lennon’s White Album demo bag; “Antique Bull” is a rollicking, piano-rolled folk shanty with a winsome lead vocal from Lisa Lobsinger; “Possible Grenade” is a dark, menacing rumble of a track that yields to a suitably stormy finale.
Inhabiting that undefined space where rhythm, melody and noise coalesce, “Something for all of us…” offers 11 different perspectives on Brendan Canning without ever defining him by any one. If Canning was something of an enigma to Broken Social Scene fans before listening to this album, its greatest triumph is that, now, he seems like even more of one.