Truck Violence
The Weathervane Is My Body
THE FLENSER/MOTHLAND
It’s funny to watch, in real time, the influence of a major act on younger bands. Let’s just get it out of the way: Truck Violence are very Chat Pile–coded. Look at the comments on their YouTube videos and you’ll find plenty of other people making that comparison, mostly in a positive context. Both bands are born from similar geographical milieus—in the case of Truck Violence, it’s the prairies of Alberta. Their music blends noise rock, sludge metal, and raw folk, as Chat Pile did on last year’s collaboration with Hayden Pedigo; it’s an unhinged, feral fusion that sounds as imposing and despairing as their barren hometown plains.
The now-Montreal-based four-piece’s second album The Weathervane Is My Body is their first via the esteemed home of challenging and dark music, The Flenser, only furthering comparisons to their revered Oklahoman labelmates. In fairness, the only track that sounds a bit too we-have-Chat Pile-at-home is lead single “New Jesus.” Across the rest of these nine songs, Truck Violence land on a pretty unique musical language, one that surprises with its violent twists and turns. For example, the inclusion of a banjo around the mid-point of “You’re Name, It’s Walking” is properly stunning, a brilliant blend that the band should make more use of in future as it did in their past. It’s the quieter moments that have the most impact; the heart-stopping guitars that open “Compelled by Christy” (which more so recall La Dispute), or the sparse folk of “Gerard, Be Quiet,” which allows vocalist Karsyn Henderson to stretch his impressive vocal range.
Despite this, the album lacks lucidity in terms of its ideas and themes. Henderson’s observations and images often fail to come through, although it’s not totally his fault. Instead, it’s due to a combination of the way these songs are constructed, which doesn’t really give his words the room to have much impact, and his lyrics that sometimes tip beyond dark poetry into eyebrow-raising silliness. It’s a fine line between potently imagistic and messily abstract, and Truck Violence walks it like they’re leaving a bar at 2 a.m. Regardless, The Weathervane Is My Body will definitely be many listeners’ strange cup of tea. There’s more than enough visceral impact and doom-laden ambition here to suggest that Truck Violence will do even more impressive things in the future. They just need to figure out how to be more direct with their hammer blows.
