Trench Party
Kitchen (2010)
Brian Shultz
It seems that Trench Party is actually the moniker for this one dude, Jake Cook, and his solo musical outlet. He's released a shitload of EPs, seemingly all of them homemade and DIY to some extent or another. Take a wild guess where he did this one.
There's, of course, a consequential warm, humming, lo-fi quality to these songs, but it's not really what makes Kitchen a middling effort. The songs dabble in this really straightforward singer-songwriter territory, and while it's not directly derivative of any influences, there's nothing that really stand out about them. Cook just rolls through these tracks with a lower register and daunting languidness.
It's just these linear narratives that don't really go anywhere. It's okay to forgo verse/chorus structure, but these are just paragraph blocks delivered forgettably. "In My Country There Is Problem," I have to assume, is some sort of weird anti-immigration satire, and there's an awkward embrace of death in "May I Have This Dance?". You can never quite tell when he's being serious, and there's really little-to-no dynamic in his voice or (mono)tone delivering the lyrics anyhow. Things don't really change when he opts for a cover of Bracket's "Sour," save a few melodic upswings that he didn't really write himself anyway. Closer "CAPS LOCK: For Emphasis" provides a few glimmers of hope by way of a temporary rythmic or melodic change. I'm not really sure which; it's just so brief but practically hooky in comparison to everything else here.
In the bio info given here, Cook boasts of having recorded a variety of genre-spanning styles over the course of his young musical exploration: "instrumental thrash" and "bright, lush indie pop," possibly among others. I'm not sure why he chose to record some boring, homemade acoustic songs in that case.