“We learn to speak from people, and to be silent from gods.” – Plutarch
Truck Violence’s second full length record, The weathervane is my body, is an attempt to answer, an attempt at conciliation through refusal.
Karsyn Henderson and Paul Lecours grew up in a French Canadian town of six hundred people, graduating in a class of nine. By fifteen they were running a local studio and radio station. There was no industry support, no infrastructure, no template for what they were trying to do, only the work itself and the conviction that it was worth doing.
At seventeen they relocated to Montreal, joined by Chris Clegg and Thomas Hart, assembled from different corners of the country, and began building Truck Violence from the ground up. The weathervane is my body, the band’s second full-length record and first with San Francisco’s The Flenser, is the product of that process. Every element reflects this. The group composition, the recording, the mixing and the visual media were all produced in house without outside intervention. DIY here is not an aesthetic choice or a marketing angle, it is the only honest option available.
The album cover was shot on film by the band on Avenue du Parc in Montreal. A figure perches atop a small Quebecois-style house, handbuilt from reclaimed materials, spine curved, legs pulled in, bare-backed against a skyline that dwarfs everything beneath it. A rural thing dropped into the grit of the city, small and out of place and refusing to disappear. The body is naked and defenseless, open to every stimulus the world cares to deliver. This is the album in a single image.
The weathervane is my body is a continuation, an expansion, a further scribbling together of that angry statement of purpose that is their debut album, aptly titled Violence. Rooted in the noise rock and post-hardcore traditions, and steeped in a DIY ethic that runs deep in Canadian underground culture, the record is uncompromising in its refusal to be anything other than what it is: immediate, self-determined, and built entirely by the hands that imagined it.
