Band: Project: Wiretapper

Album: Brute Force Trauma

Album Year: 2007

Label: Self Released

Genre(s): Old School Industrial / EBM

Band Website: http://www.myspace.com/projectwiretapper  

Rating: 6/10

I should start by saying that I acquired this album at one of my shows. A guy I had never heard of wanted to trade his album for mine. Ok, we all know how that goes. Some seemingly random guy gives you a hand made album of theirs and is like "hey check out my album". Of course you always expect those albums to be come from some asshole who downloaded fruity loops the week before and immediately went to work making their masterpiece of presets and bad samples, and all of a sudden they have a full album done. Anyhow, the next day I popped the CD into my stereo and BAM...I was very surprised.

Now you see, Project: Wiretapper not only doesn't suck, but it is actually pretty unique, especially among modern era EBM music. Project: Wiretapper is a mixture modern EBM and a throwback to the origins of EBM, most notably Front Line Assembly, with strong political overtones. Basically what I am saying is that PW has a contemporary sound quality, but structures his tracks in a way that is reminiscent of the old school. The influence is apparent but not in any way overwhelming. PW utilizes some strong, driving synthwork and drums and combines them with great, meaningful samples and simple though heartfelt vocals. I should note that the synths here are unlike so much new EBM music. There is no generic trance here, instead there are many modulated and well crafted rhythm lines. The drums are somewhat simple, although well done; you can tell that they are not the focus of the album and are instead intended to provide a solid rhythm, which I feel that they accomplish. The vocals are pretty simple and follow similar structures throughout the album, but the lyrical content is good and depicts numerous political events and scandals. One of the things I enjoy most about PW is the use of subtlety. I think explaining it here would ruin it, but examples are the play-on-word-titles and the meaning in the lengths in some of his songs; most notably Voice From the Grave and Novus Ordo. 

This album is not without flaws, but I feel that the majority of the flaws are simply the fate of all debut albums. It feels like Project: Wiretapper knows where he wants to go, but has not fully developed that style yet. A lot of the songs are short and to an extent underdeveloped. Many of them have 1:30 intros but the entire song is only 3:30. The songs seem to all follow the structure of verse, chorus, verse chorus, end. I would like to see the songs drawn out more, and maybe some different elements brought in during the bridge portion and fleshed out. The only other qualm I have is that the quality of the vocals is kind of rough, but like I said, it's a debut album. I feel like Brute Force Trauma is a good starting place and I hope that PW will continue to build and develop what he has started thus far, and by doing so will discover his own musical identity. There are a lot of very good ideas presented on Brute Force Trauma and I feel that Project: Wiretapper is definitely a band to watch for in the future, especially for those of you lamenting the absence of old school EBM.

- [.d4n b4rr3tt.]

July 2007