In this article we’re presenting two premieres — a full stream of Shattered Lament Unmoored, the debut album by the Costa Rican band Deplorable, which will be released today by the Dutch label Breathe Plastic, and a video for one of the album’s six songs. Perhaps the best one-word description for both of them is… HARROWING. But of course we’ll try to flesh that out with more words.
It might be best to begin with the video and the song it presents, “Apparition In The Ether“, even though that song appears second in the album’s track list, because it provides such a soul-shattering introduction to the black chasm of dread and despair that the album opens up beneath us as listeners.
Deplorable‘s members have spent time in such groups as Astriferous, Engraved, and VoidOath, but you’ll learn from “Apparition In The Ether” that in this current configuration they’ve chosen an obliterating amalgam of sludge, doom, and death (with some other ingredients we’ll touch upon) to capture the degradation, hopelessness, and horror that so often afflicts the human condition.
As this song reveals with frightening intensity, Deplorable can be ruthless in their sonic portrayals of nihilism. The riffing, which is cruelly coated in grime and grit, slashes and churns like a cataclysm joined in progress. The bass sounds like a subterranean upheaval. The drums thunder and batter in barrages of destructiveness. The vocals scream in abject torment.
There’s no hint of hope when the music slows and descends from grindcore-like mayhem into a pit of sludge/doom. Instead, it inflicts a methodical, pulverizing beating, interspersed with chords that wail and drag, groaning in agony and sinking into a cesspool of congealing viscera while eerie whistling tones put nerves on edge.
To mix our metaphors, the music then lurches and stomps ahead like a doomed march to the gallows while the condemned man screams in pain and despair and ejects ghastly roars. And it also sounds like the executioner is pounding the victim with iron-shod mallets, breaking bones before the rope necklace is put in place.
There’s another way to consider the song, a vision captured in the blood-freezing video, which depicts the hideous treatments of the mentally ill during a different age.
As you’ve already now discovered, Deplorable have drawn influence from such sludge icons as Noothgrush, Toadliquor, Grief, and Cough, but aren’t slavish in their homage to such traditions. The high-speed opening barrage of “Apparition In The Ether” is a vivid demonstration of that, but not the only one on the album. It may be disconcerting to contemplate, but that song also isn’t the scariest one on the album, though it’s not easy selecting the one that deserves that horrid prize.
Deplorable repeatedly demonstrate a sadistic affinity for methodically bludgeoning their listeners into unrecognizable masses of bone splinters and intestinal jelly. Those blows are humongously heavy, just as the chords are feculent and foul in their sound, sizzling with disease. The reverb-ridden vocals are also impressively varied in their range, monstrous and tortured and horrifying in every aspect, and the band also throw in some disturbing vocal samples for good measure.
While primitive and brutish pounding is often prime, Deplorable also switch gears within songs without warning, discharging electrifying drum progressions that sound like frenzied gunshots in a street fight, and chord progressions that capture the revels of violent madness or radiate the kind of woozy narcotics that are hallmarks of especially nasty brands of stoner/doom, plus screams of feedback that feel like scalpels peeling flesh from the soles of feet.
Moreover, at the end of “Misery Accures” and the opening of “Panegírico” they break into feral punk romps – if ghouls were into punk. And the tremolo’d effusions within that second song are exhilarating but are no one’s idea of sane. The same goes for the electronics deployed in the opening of “Mournful Dirge“, one of several ways in which the band bring in the supernatural. (What they bring in during that song’s final two minutes, and thus the album’s final two minutes, is an ear-ruining storm of harsh noise, an especially ruinous finale for an especially ruinous album.)
We should finally underscore that while the music is mentally and emotionally devastating at its core, the grooves are often so gargantuan and even electrifying that it becomes reflexively head-moving — except when Deplorable are slowly choking the life from you and gouging out entrails.
And with that we’ll leave you to the un-tender ministrations of Shattered Lament Unmoored in full.
The album features cover art by Tommy Wilson, who has crafted visuals for such other bands as Infest, Dropdead, and Jeromes Dream. Breathe Plastic is releasing the album on tape. For more info, check the links below.
And for more info about the band and their approach to music, check out the extensive interview comments that appeared in a 2020 feature by Dutch Pearce at DECIBEL — here.
PRE-ORDER:
https://store.breathe-plastic.org/product/deplorable-shattered-lament-unmoored/
BREATHE PLASTIC:
https://label.breathe-plastic.org
https://www.instagram.com/breatheplastic
DEPLORABLE:
https://www.instagram.com/deplorablerites/
https://deplorablerites.bandcamp.com/