Tapewyrm - House of Cards

It's the start of a fresh year, and everyone drank last night with their families and their loved ones, friends and enemies, and everyone's waking up with a massive headache. However, rather than sitting down, putting ice on your head and trying to get over that, why not get rid of that sore by giving yourself a rather large dose of noise? Because that's what I'm doing right now and I'm really not sure this is the best thing for myself at the moment.

However, I can take solace in the fact that I am listening to very good noise from the man behind Tapewyrm. Just yesterday, via Juggernaut Music Group, an EP titled House of Cards that serves as a closure for the first chapter of the project was released. What we have here are five tracks, one of which has already made an appearance on Fuck You - Enjoy! Vol. 1, and two of which are remixes.

To describe Tapewyrm is as easy as comparing the noise shooting out of my headphones to that of a drill entering your head. However, the drill is somehow pleasurable instead of painful. The title track on the album follows through with this code, and has this subliminal voice attributed to Tiffanie Wells. It's hard to hear, and it's meant to be that way, but once you uncover the secret in the song, it is pretty creepy.

Chasing Ghosts is a slower song, but not one that you can expect to slow dance to on a romantic dinner date with your wife. Unless, of course, you decide to do a romantic slow dance in the middle of a graveyard with the blessings of the damned. Then this would just fit in perfectly.

Careless is by far my favorite track on the album, and certainly shows off exactly why Tapewyrm is so good at making noise. It's harsh and unforgiving, constantly beating you down with pounding synths and lots and lots of hammering effects.

The last two songs on the album are remixes from Ruinizer, who does a remix of Save Yourself, and Dirty K, who mashed apart Rebirth. Save Yourself does a fantastic job of blending together electronics, taking away the minimal approach to the song and adding a lot more. The Rebirth remix keeps well within the noise category, and just adds so much more to it that it becomes one of the hardest songs on the EP, second, in my opinion, to only Careless.

And so we come to the end of the first act of this noise project. It's a fantastic way to end the chapter, throwing everything you got at it, and coming out with an awesome result. Although there are only three original songs on the EP, I do admit that I appreciate them more than any of Tapewyrm's other songs. House of Cards stands out to me as one of the hardest albums of 2013. It's both a great way to end the old year, and bring in the new one. Jan 01 2014