Devalued: Plagues

     
          Self-released // 2012
          Dropped by Robert Miller

Music from this album
Devalued: “Mandark”
Devalued: “Boulders”

I’ve only been to Miami one time, and it was for a grindcore show. I packed into a van with one of the bands that was playing that night, rushed out of Orlando and took to the Southern coast. The show was at the infamous Churchill’s, a run-down British-style pub with a sweet spot for heavy music that just so happens to be right in the heart of—what I was told was—”Little Haiti.” In the 10 minutes it took to drive around and find Churchill’s, I witnessed every stereotype of Miami I had ever heard of. One guy offered me meth nearly the moment I stepped out of the vehicle, one guy flashed a gun at me from under his belt (either that or the wind just lifted his shirt up) and I saw a pregnant woman in a tube top walk casually in front of ongoing traffic unaware of the high beams zipping right past her and her unborn child. The only thing that threw me further out of my norm was the salty bouncer at the door with the searing cockney accent who was almost too nice for his abnormally large build and grim demeanor. And then there was the show itself: sweat, hair, screeching, bodies flying, bodies surfing, feet to the face, maybe even some blood . . . you get the picture. Point is, Miami loves its heavy music and it seems like the perfectly depraved landscape to fit the scene, so no wonder.

Devalued is a new heavy band from Miami whose genre is so hard to define it’s like trying to say a tomato is a fruit, or Pluto a moon—some will say one way, and some will just get too butt-hurt over semantics to say anything at all. Really, they’re an amalgamation of hardcore, sludge, punk, D-beat and Salsacore? (Check out the Facebook page for more on that.) I’d like to say they’ve got a heavy lean toward hardcore just to keep things nice and easy, and when the first song off their debut 10-track tape, Plagues, “This Town is Full of Goobers,” starts off on a tribal drum fill (via Matt Stoyka) and leads straight into downtrodden guitars, chaotic bass lines (Conor Barbato) and searing yowls from frontman Nico Cordoba, all you can think to do is throw your hands in the air, beat your vocal chords into submission and dance your fucking heart out. And it doesn’t stop there; right on through to the final grindcore mess of a track, “Boulders,” Plagues is a neck-breaking non-stop party.

Listening through the album at first, sans lyric sheet, I had to deal with a complete sensory overload. It’s as if I’m sticking my head in a meat grinder and grimacing the pain in favor of the thrill. Devalued love to mess with the structural integrity of their songs, too, such as on the short “Coke Dick” track where an almost pop-punk sounding opening gets you swaying back and forth before it stops dead in its tracks and careens into a relentless blast beat. “Mandark” is certainly a standout track with a clever vocal sample of the four-eyed Dexter’s Laboratory villain laughing maniacally in the beginning and moving on to some of the sludgiest breakdowns of the album that would have bands like Eyehategod and even Pig Destroyer running to keep up.

What really threw me for a curve on Plagues is when I actually pulled out the lyric sheet to decipher Cordoba’s innocuous yells to see what it was all about. Right from the get-go, “This Town is Full of Goobers” has the band calling out their own home town, Broward county, for its deplorable people and scene. It’s kind of shocking to hear the band start their debut album on such an aggressive note, but one can’t help but appreciate the honesty and clarity: “Home of boredom and stupid shits / Empty bottles, and purple dicks / Pregnant scene queens, you make me sick.” While Plagues starts with such a painfully clear outlook, it moves on in a heavily metaphorical direction with invisible suns, ancient kingdoms and particularly vultures to represent some of the more primitive aspects of human nature. It’s moments like these were I start to like the band even more than I already did. The ability to see the connections between story telling and real life is always appreciative, such as on “Boulders” where the crux summation of Plagues comes to fruition: “Boulders and thorns, we become from earth / In sands our bones now await / Boulders and thorns, we beacon from earth / Into plains of pure nothingness.”

I spoke briefly with Cordoba about the influences and themes of the album, and while he fully admitted that they were a little all over the place thematically, the album came down to this consensus ideal that we as human beings are prone to destructive behaviors. You can see it all throughout history with war, violence, famine and more, but those aren’t just plagues for the history books; they’ve carried on even into our modern lives. On the blistering “Lands and Titles” track Devalued dive into even more basic concepts of life and what it means to even be in the first place: “Diverge yourself from what you are / Transcend the virtues of present tenses / Let us not reopen scars / Let us not find our men, lands and titles as the same.” As the album progresses, you can almost hear this switch in the band’s attitude between aimless impassioned ravings and thoughtful, pointed analysis.

Whether it’s the way that Plagues covers a smorgasbord of musical genres, or skips around on choice lyrical topics, it seems that Devalued found it difficult to pinpoint a central plan of attack. But with this album being their first self-released collection of songs, I’d say they did better than many of their peers—leaps and bounds beyond, in fact. On top of that, they employed the help of Nico’s brother, Mauro, in the department of production, and the crisp, clear sound is tantalizing to the ears, like a sweet, sugary treat of hardcore vibrato. Even Nico admitted that it was difficult to pinpoint a centralized ideal for Plauges, but as he pointed out, the album cover—depicting people impaled in an agonizingly gothic and primitive fashion—sums up the point pretty well: we’re all animals, destined for the dirt.

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Stream Plauges in full via Devalued’s Bandcamp below: