The Weathervane is My Body

Description

The second album by Truck Violence, "The weathervane is my body," is an attempt at an answer, an attempt at reconciliation through refusal. Karsyn Henderson and Paul Lecours grew up in a small French-Canadian town of 600 people, where they finished their studies in a class of nine students. At fifteen, they were already running a local studio and radio station. They had no industry support, no infrastructure, no role models to follow, only the work itself and the conviction that it was worth it. At seventeen, they moved to Montreal, joined by Chris Clegg and Thomas Hart from across the country, and began building Truck Violence from scratch. "The weathervane is my body," their second album and the first on San Francisco's The Flenser label, is the fruit of this process. Every element bears witness to it. The band's composition, recording, mixing, and visual materials were all done in-house, without outside intervention. Here, DIY is neither an aesthetic choice nor a marketing strategy; it is the only honest option available to them. The album cover was photographed by the band itself on Avenue du Parc in Montreal. A silhouette is perched on a small Quebec-style house, built with its own hands from salvaged materials. With a bent back and folded legs, it stands out, naked, against a horizon that dominates everything below. A rural element parachuted into the city's tumult, tiny and out of place, but refusing to disappear. The body is naked and defenseless, exposed to all the aggressions the world wishes to inflict upon it. That is the album in a single image. "The weathervane is my body" is a continuation, a deepening, an additional scribble of the raging declaration of intent that is their first album, aptly titled "Violence." Rooted in noise rock and post-hardcore traditions, and steeped in a DIY ethos deeply embedded in Canadian underground culture, the record refuses any compromise and defines itself uncompromisingly: it is immediate, self-determined, and entirely built by those who imagined it. The body is still as capricious, felt everywhere and in everyone to varying degrees. It is young and seeks an elusive consolation. "Scream again," this record seems to say, "but together. Scream your honesty as your neighbor does for you." The weathervane sways with the whims of the world, a world of people, things, and actions. No guiding principle can soothe the mind, and yet it is our duty to build something, a shelter and a bed, a long table and an open room swept by many footsteps. This is how we perceive beauty, because we are imperfect enough to suffer. Every attempt is a failure, but in that failure lies the proof. In the awkward moans and imperfect jingles of the strings, we fail and, in doing so, create beauty. This record is a deeply human composition, crying out in multiple forms. What surrounds it and speaks even more is the perfect, respectful silence. - Karsyn As Kierkegaard argues, failing to be oneself is one of the many causes of human despair, and nowhere is this failure more evident than in the media we have created. They demand caricature, plastic and digestible food, a self shaped and hammered into impossible forms. And so, we are in despair.