The Broken Social Scene member's second full-length is decidedly laid-back and homespun. Every track is built around a spine of fingerpicked acoustic guitar and many stop there, content to exist without vocals or instrumental embellishment. Compared to the messy, sprawling indie rock churned out by his main band Broken Social Scene, Brendan Canning's 2008 solo debut Something for All of Us was a surprisingly low-key affair filled with humble, simply tuneful songs. Canning's kept busy in the half-decade since that album's release with a wide variety of activities, from Broken Social Scene's studio swan song (2010's Forgiveness Rock Record) to film scores (this year's Lindsay Lohan comeback vehicle The Canyons) to a complex, mysterious interactive multimedia endeavor involving director David Cronenberg and a biotech lab. Given the scope of these projects, it's easy to understand why Canning's approach to his new solo record You Gots 2 Chill was decidedly laid-back and homespun: he put together his own independent label to handle the album's release (named for his home street, tucked into the heart of downtown Toronto), drew the cover art himself, and recorded without help from any of his Broken Social Scene associates. The album title isn't a command to listeners—it's a note to self, the kind of thing you'd throw on a Post-It note and stick onto your fridge. The music contained within You Gots 2 Chill is true to the album's low-key origins and winking title. Every track is built up around a spine of fingerpicked acoustic guitar and many stop there, content to exist without vocals or instrumental embellishment; Canning draws a rough-hewn, earthen beauty from the strings on tracks like the misty "Never Go to the Races" and the wistful "Last Song for the Summer Hideaway". There's a refreshing sense of humor present in the album's song titles and sequencing: "Makes You Motor" chuckles at its unhurried mid-tempo groove, while the frisky "Plugged In" lives off the grid just like the rest of the record. Taken together, this sense of humor and the album's unadorned songwriting combine to give You Gots 2 Chill, and Canning, a charmingly unpretentious vibe. That's not to say that the record is entirely devoid of fully realized songs: cuts like the bubbling, slowly layered "However Long" and the pedal steel-flecked lead single "Bullied Days" (sung by Snowblink's Daniela Gesundheit) are fleshed out without sacrificing Canning's ear for gentle, slowly shifting melody. You Gots 2 Chill also pays quiet tribute to the sound and feel of analog technology, with two interludes ("Long Live Land Lines" and "Once a Lighthouse") recorded directly onto Canning's voicemail and placed onto the album. He tips his cap at the influence of the experimental acoustic guitarist John Fahey on album opener "Post Fahey", and by devoting the remainder of the album to an exploration of the instrument's melodic possibilities and moods, he makes a decent argument for its continued relevance. But You Gots 2 Chill's defining characteristic is also its key weakness: if listeners fail to grant each new mid-tempo acoustic number its fair share of attention, they begin to blur together into one large mid-tempo acoustic blob. This is a bedtime record, in both the complementary and dismissive senses of the word: it invites you to relax and soothes like a warm cup of tea, but can cross the line into powerfully soporific territory.