Two years ago, Truck Violence sounded motion sick, bile lurching up their throats with an acidic burn. Violence, their debut album, felt at odds with the world and all the usual ways of navigating it, knocking together post-hardcore, noise rock, and rustic folk into an avant-garde approach to punk. Under the stewardship of co-founders singer-poet Karsyn Henderson and guitarist-banjoist Paul Lecours, the Montreal-via-Alberta quartet returns with its second full-length LP, The weathervane is my body, where lacerating guitars, forthright emotion, and a newfound tolerance of extremes allows the band to play louder without bridging such wide gaps as before.
The weathervane is my body glides between sludge metal and plucky bluegrass passages with a surefooted balance, losing the awkward sway from queasy noise-rock to folk stillness that made their debut so endearing. Lecours is still plucking away at his banjo with an air of dejection, but now it emerges sparingly, like a mid-song breather between arched metal riffs in “Your name, It’s walking,” a downgrade for a unique tool in this genre. If you were a fan of Truck Violence’s banjo when it smashed headfirst into a concrete slab of shoegaze, you might miss their conviction that, actually, no, everything doesn’t have to blend together seamlessly.
They make a compelling case for how menacing their ideas can sound when buffed for all-in integration, though. Single “New Jesus” layers noise until its synchronized riffs beget head-banging, as does the nu-metal groove beneath bent guitar strings in “Jaundiced and reaching for a mother,” a tale of immortality by breeding despite hereditary risks. The particularly walloping “Compelled by Christy” leaves no boulder unturned as it crashes through elephantine power chords and a slowcore trudge; when banjo pokes around the corner to survey the destruction, it sets to scale the sheer force of Truck Violence’s sound.
As deep as they wade into heavy music, Truck Violence haven’t parted with the traditional folk of their rural upbringing in Alberta. Acoustic strums are interspersed with solitary slide guitar notes and occasional bursts of banjo on “Gerard, be quiet,” where Henderson performs a spoken word-style recollection of riding the school bus. The bandmates offer a lo-fi take with “House caught fire,” which echoes like a voice memo recorded in an empty room. Every now and again, Truck Violence let a subtle, naturalistic addition poke though, like the guitar triplets that evoke a distant stream in the otherwise foreboding “Stomach as a tower and the globules descending.”
Henderson takes that vulnerability farthest as a singer, conveying depth in ways even more emphatic and memorable than the abrasive noise-rock or barren folk. On closer “Kindly, wash yourself,” he reaches upward and outward with his voice, stepping into the zone of Midwest emo. The only other component in line with that style is the song’s opening guitar riff—an isolated, twinkling, finger-picked acoustic pattern in the style of Strictly Ballroom or the Jazz June—and yet his vocals are unmistakably altered. “Wash yourself clean/And get washed clean of everything,” Henderson calls with melodic clarity. He sounds so similar to Bob Nanna that at first I thought Braid came on shuffle—until the song’s coarse midsection arrived and Henderson bellowed out the song’s most slam-dunk emo lyric: “Won’t you cry for the first time?” Not only does the genre sound natural for Truck Violence, it opens a cavernous area that allows their primal instincts to flourish.
On The weathervane is my body, Truck Violence transform from a burdened colossus hunched over in pain to a tearful creature who’s finally free of that weight. Played in full, the album begins in a place of bottled anger, prying open cracks for agony to burst outward and concluding with a release of sorrow and exhaustion. That physicality works best when transferred through the band’s delivery, even if the compositions hamper that rate this go-around. It’s an exercise in humility from the first gurgling howl that opens the album to Henderson’s final, wistful “Woo-oo-oo,” and underneath the reverb of those final open guitars, all that’s left is a fading outline.
