How much of our self-worth is tied to outward perception? And what’s lost when national identity speaks on behalf of individuals? When you grow up in the open prairies of Western Canada like singer-poet Karsyn Henderson did, giving in to the draw of a bustling city population and its promise of fame almost feels sinful. But when trading rural Alberta for the cosmopolitan Montréal to give Truck Violence a fighting chance, he and his bandmates refused to sever their roots. Instead, they proudly tether themselves to the oft-misunderstood province while admitting their racing thoughts thrived in the city’s fast-paced environment. The avant-garde punk quartet’s debut album, Violence, soundtracks this bridging of opposites by soldering jarring music genres together—noise rock, bluegrass, sludge metal, experimental post-hardcore—like towering brutalist sculptures welded from rusty steel beams.
Released last summer on Mothland and now getting a vinyl rerelease courtesy of Southern Lord, the metal label home to Sunn O))) and Power Trip, Violence is ballsy and weird in ways that Truck Violence convince you are normal. They open the album with pummeling blast beats straight out of death metal and toss them into a slosh of shoegaze guitars, sobering dropouts, and a new-wave bass line. “Lecture” clears away the sludge with syncopated drumming and an isolated guitar riff that creeps closer with each measure until its mounting anxiety latches onto the listener and the whole band barges back into frame to crack your skull open with lashing noise rock. Truck Violence repeatedly hurl themselves around with this reckless abandon, but find ways to catch themselves before they hit the cement floor, too. Metalcore and drone dominate “The gash” until guitarist Paul Lecours strolls in with plucky banjo—a move so left-field yet self-assured, it’s like high school students clearing a circle around the quiet kid for his interpretive dance moves at prom. Despite a classic combination of heavy and quiet, Violence is never predictable or formulaic; its music is more akin to the artful, experimental metal typically courted by San Francisco label The Flenser, like Chat Pile’s God’s Country or Elizabeth Colour Wheel’s Nocebo.
Much of Violence concerns itself with desire and the guilt of coveting attention. As Henderson begs for compliments—“I’ll never be interesting enough to have a collection of prose/written about me, and/Ultimately that’s my goal/to be written about,” he howls on “Undressed you layn’t before”—what appears to be a personal pursuit doubles as a stand-in for covertly craving peer recognition amidst social divides. Other provinces paint Alberta as “the Texas of Canada,” meant to insinuate the province is ripe with farmers, oil reserves, and addicts. But Truck Violence embrace that rural culture at their shows by dressing in camo and trapper caps, spray painting a rifle on their bed sheet banner, and dragging generators outdoors to play under bridges and in the woods. On the thrashing “Drunk to death,” Henderson tells the story of a loner with nothing to his name but apathy and alcohol, surrounded by farmland. “Is it so much that I feel this intensely?” he screams, a rewording of the human right to dream. Who’s to say this guy is less interesting than a wealthy Toronto painter, especially as the song’s protagonist describes the brown and yellow hues of tilled fields as an inverted ceiling of brambly coffers?
