Review Summary: The bear as effigy?
The backbone of this country is the independent truck, so saith the spitting mirror held to the great western underbelly, and violence is the message being carried down the highways to every cancer-ridden capillary in this great and dying beast. Trace that genealogy from there to this album and you might get a sense of the foundation Truck Violence’s attack is built upon. Our northern brethren are reveling in the slow slide to oblivion we’re all wrapped inescapably in, as drunk on raging passion and self-absorption as Sprain were last year, but clothed here in flannel and the violence of the Canadian backwoods, much as Chat Pile took the utterly bleak urban Midwest as its canvas two years ago.
But it requires something more than those comparisons, as favorable as they are, to completely recommend it. Certainly, Truck Violence are much more focused than Sprain were, much to their benefit. What
Violence does well (very well, in fact) is translate that same raging alienation into its own particular language, but what comes across is often simply the same brand of fury dressed Canadian, a theme that certainly bears exploring based on the wealth of riveting material to be found here, but which speaks in the same tones and cues of its forebears. The banjo-dirges, as centerpiece and interlude and latter-day ballad makes for more than a whiplash veering off the trail and into the undergrowth, but lockstep-clicks with the hardcore seethe boiling up from the rest of the album. It’s a wonderful element that adds a sufficiently original tone to the mix, but which doesn’t quite break away into something that makes Truck Violence completely its own beast. The poetics, if not as self-consciously built off of the narcissistic confessional/vomiting of
The Lamb As Effigy are at least as consciously wrought from erudition and disgust in equal measure, and we can say that much of what we love about the interplay between the musical roar and this feverish emoting is how deft Truck Violence are at pushing and pulling between Karsyn Henderson’s roars, moans, bellows and whispers and the ever-simmering, often explosive hardcore violence of the rest of the band.
Violence may not be as original as it perhaps hopes to be, but its attempt to express a universal alienation in local terms is both admirably constructed and intuitively thrilling.
