"I don't want to speak about it that much," Apostle of Hustle's Andrew Whiteman responds to the first question I put to him over the phone from San Francisco on a night off from the band's tour in support of Andrew Bird, waiting for some tequila to arrive. Before I have time to move quickly on from what I know might be a bad first approach, Whiteman continues, "With Apostle of Hustle I get to be more of the boss, you know? I get to have more of a control over what's going on. But the chemistry's so strong that I can't really imagine not making music with any of these people, do you know what I mean? It's in my blood."

"These people," of course, include both Apostle of Hustle and the members of Whiteman's "other" band, Broken Social Scene, a group who have by now become so ubiquitous to the Canadian music scene that I feel both stupid for having considered describing them to you in this article and for being unable to approach the subject of Apostle of Hustle and their second album National Anthem of Nowhere without asking Whiteman to compare his role in the two bands in that first question.

Continuing on, he muses, "I remember our first broken Social Scene gig with (Justin) Perhoff and (Brendan) Canning, and Kevin (Drew) and me and Feist, and we played that gig and right after the gig we all looked at each other and just went "Jesus." It's like Neil Young and Crazy Horse, do you know what I mean? I cant see that going away. It's a strong musical chemistry."

Without getting into the logistics of casting Feist as an infinitely more fuckable Neil Young , I have to admit that I like that comparison. Big, jammy, off-kilter, rock and roll, only with less misogyny and more guitars. And, perhaps similarly to Crazy Horse as a separate entity from Mr. Young, the creative offshoots of various members of the Broken Social Scene collective �?? Do Make Say Think, Jason Collett, Apostle, et al. �?? exist, for better or worse, in the shadow of papa BSS. Whiteman sees the upside of the potential conundrum of receiving recognition in one band for what's been achieved with another: "Being in Apostle of Hustle right now is just like starting at the beginning again. But on the other hand, I doubt anybody would listen to my record and I doubt I would be getting the recognition I am getting if I wasn't in Broken Social Scene. You could look at it as a strike against me, or, you know, you could look at it in the positive sense-- which is what I do--and recognize that it's helped me get my foot in a couple of doors."

Listening to National Anthem of Nowhere is an interesting affair for one familiar with any Broken Social Scene material. While the album is considerably more subdued than the sonic onslaught of something like "7/4 (Shorelines)," with more emphasis on the indie and less on the rock, Whiteman's guitar work is instantly recognizable, melodies that may have been nearly lost in the construction of Scene songs here allowed to stand front and centre. But Anthem is not a straightforward indie rock album, either, as Whiteman infuses his songs with elements of folk and Latin, electronic addendums and extended instrumentals.

The complexity and depth that emerges on subsequent listens to the album is, according to Whiteman, due to research, not happy accident. "I'm a world music geek. I'm very much a thief, a raven or whatever. I some something interesting and I fly down and pick it up. I'm just always interested in different rhythmical things, different percussion, whatever." So while "My Sword Hand's Anger" swings and pulses overtop of fuzzy tape loops, "Rafaga," five songs later, grinds the shit out of a tango while Whiteman sings in what sounds like (according to my limited knowledge) to be impressive Spanish, all without seeming contrived, forced, or awkward.

I choose to finish the interview off with a question as potentially hackle-raising as the one I began with, regarding the significance of the album's title. Loaded question, perhaps amateur, but I've actually vested some interpretation of my own into what it may suggest, and I'm interested to hear something about it from the horse's mouth. And, instead of asking me to go sort it out for myself, Whiteman is accommodating, with his answer ending up acting as a sort of blueprint for listening to the album as a whole:

"Well, you were speaking of layers before, and certainly you could apply that to that title. There's a lot of layers to that title. There's a lot of characters on our record, I'm interested in these characters that go to the edges of places, the borders. And an edge is where you've gone to... as far as you can go, or a place as far as you know. And it could be physical, like a geographical border-- you know, "National Anthem," right? -- or it could be an emotional border, or an intellectual, sexual, spiritual...you know what I mean? It's about that sort of space where these people are at the edge of what they know."

(The English student interjects):

Me - Which I guess is sort of the route to some sort of discovery, right?

(The Musician corrects):

"It could be. Or it could be that you just turn around and run the fuck back to where you came from."