Not a handbag in sight
Following up from their debut "Dear Love: a beautiful dischord" The Devil Wears Prada's second effort has nothing to do with 'that' film. No, there is no talk of Dior sunglasses, Louis Vitton handbags or Versace shoes here, nor is there any sniff of the album being a quasi – morality piece about the shallowness of the fashion world and about how being yourself is far better than what some magazine dictates. There are no doe-eyed realisations, no monster bosses and certainly no strained romances. Instead, what we have here is yet another metal attempt which falls rather short of its intended target.
Sounding like a mish mash of bands, all to samey to mention, Plagues does not impress. Relatively aggressive in their delivery, but lacking the originality to drive their message home, the album is merely a wall of noise and not an impressive one at that. With that typical metal shout/scream voice along with the typical breakdowns and such, there is just nothing new here. In fact, the whole thing feels lazy and recycled with not much attention paid to pushing things a little bit further, trying that little bit harder and working to their potential. With a distant lack of experimentalism here, you feel like this band could do far better than this mediocre offering.
Despite using some interesting time structures to add that bit more oomph, the band still fall short of wowing the listener, and instead sound like a mix of other non-descript second rate metalcore bands cobbled together. Likewise, no tracks really stand out a great deal, although "Number three, never forget", the most commercial sounding track on Plagues, does have a fair bit of clout to it with its wide expansive noises and combining the shout and scream vocals relatively well with the changeable time structure, but again, it is nothing which hasn't been done before.
The Devil Wears Prada probably should think about changing their name. So wholly associated with that film now, you can't help but mentioning it when you talk about the band and it hardly screams originality. In fact, the whole package sounds unoriginal and about four years too late and although that this is a band picking up momentum in the states, they simply just doesn't cut it in the scheme of things. There is a saturated market in terms of metal/metalcore at the moment and this is just lost in the miasma.