Mark Garvey sets fire to the political circus on ‘Truck Fump’
Mark Garvey has never sounded particularly interested in restraint, and ‘Truck Fump’ pushes that instinct to its most confrontational extreme. Taken from his third album Blue Bone, the track is a snarling collision of punk, grunge and garage-rock built around a direct attack on Donald Trump and the political climate surrounding him.
There’s no attempt at nuance here, and that is very much the point. Here, he treats protest music as a pressure valve, channelling anger into something abrasive, messy and deliberately antagonistic. The guitars are scuffed, the performance carries a homemade volatility, and the whole track has the sensation of being held together through sheer force of conviction.
That DIY quality becomes even more striking given his production process. ‘Truck Fump’, like the rest of his recent work, was created entirely in Adobe Premiere Pro, a software designed for video editing rather than music production. It’s an absurdly unconventional method, but it suits an artist whose wider practice deliberately blurs the boundaries between songs, films, artwork and multimedia experimentation.
The 90s alternative influence is obvious, but ‘Truck Fump’ feels more like a continuation of that era’s willingness to let ugliness remain in the recording than anything else. There’s no interest in sanding down the rough edges or making the anger more digestible.
More than anything, ‘Truck Fump’ captures the peculiar logic of Mark Garvey’s world: one person in a shed, making everything himself, turning frustration into noise and refusing to worry too much about whether anybody finds it tasteful.