What happens when you devise a song so unlike your signature sound that it borders on parody? And what if it’s one of the liveliest tracks on your album? If you’re Brendan Canning, of Broken Social Scene, you openly acknowledge your point of inspiration in the lyrics. The song in question is a jammy number called “Hey Marika, Get Born,” in which the title character does not listen to the Grateful Dead. The song itself sounds a lot like the band he name-checks, regardless of whether or not Marika ever listened to them. It’s a fun moment, but not one Canning commits to entirely, and it ends up being cute, rather than insightful.
There are some solid songs on Home Wrecking Years, Canning’s third solo outing beyond the comfortable crowd of Broken Social Scene. The album captures the sound of a huge group of people having fun together (even if it’s a different huge group than we’re used to), but it doesn’t make the statement that solo albums usually attempt to make, as Canning’s previous two solo albums did. His first—2008’s Something for All of Us …—crackled with an immediacy that felt like he had something to say and something to prove. His second, 2013’s You Gots 2 Chill, seemed to have even more of an air of spontaneity and adventure. (It featured two guitar pieces recorded on voicemail.)
But Home Wrecking Years feels like a guy just filling in the downtime before he gets back to work with his main band. Canning’s approach is playful, but not very meaningful. When the songs don’t sound like they would have been more at home on the long-awaited BSS album, they sound like tentative experiments at aping other bands’ styles. “Once I Was a Runner” paraphrases James Brown in an incongruous way. “Keystone Dealers,” the album’s second single, could be the long-awaited third entry on your “People from the Northern Hemisphere Doing Passable Songs with What Seems to be a Casio-Based Bossa Nova Beat” playlist. “Work Out in the Wash” has a solo that Canning openly acknowledges is a “slick eight-bar late ’70s George Benson-ish guitar solo.” And the final song on the album, “Baby’s Going Her Own Way,” sounds like it could be a gentle deep cut from a Luna album that came out after you stopped listening to Luna.
As with his debut, a couple of BSS members make their way into the army of players here, including Justin Peroff, who plays drums on the entire album, and Sam Goldberg, who plays guitar on “Vibration Walls.” On their most recent summer shows, Broken Social Scene put “Book It to Fresno,” the very BSS-ish wall-of-fuzz single from Home Wrecking Years, on their setlists because Canning isn’t planning on touring solo. In a press release, Canning called the live version “pretty shit-kicking... which felt wonderful.”
It was indeed a shit-kicking version—as is the album take. Still, the whole Home Wrecking Years project seems like Canning has arrived at a photographer’s studio in a reliable old outfit, before shyly dressing up in wacky costumes, and then taking them off immediately after the photo is snapped because he doesn’t feel comfortable in the borrowed clothing. If somebody in Canning’s party had told him that the period-specific hat and goofy scarf looked good, he might have felt the rush of possibility. But at least, with Home Wrecking Years, Canning has archived that he had the nerve to try something on that was way out of character—even if it was just for kicks.
