Review Summary: Linkin Park worship at its best.
Dear Linkin Park:
My name is Kevin Palmer and I am writing on behalf of my band Trust Company, where I sing and play guitar. We just wanted to tell you guys how much we absolutely adore you. In fact, we like you guys so much we base all our sound around yours. Total worship, you know? For example, I always quote Ches as my main influence in vocal terms, and both me and James (that’s our guitarist, James Fukai) cite Brad Delson among our favourite guitarists. Oh yeah, and Jace (that’s Jason, our drummer), he totally worships Rob Bourdon, he wants to sound like him so bad, it’s not even funny. As for Josh, our bassist, he claims to be better than your Phoenix, but when he tries to exemplify he always uses the same example. It’s always the intro to
Finally. That’s why it doesn’t really stick, IMO.
Anyway, let me fill you in on a little background. Me and James started the band in 1997, and we used to have a guy called Warren on bass. We also used to be called 41 Down, but we changed it because everyone kept asking “hey, aren’t you those snotty Canadian punk-pop kids?” So we just had enough of that and changed our name to Trust Company (when we want to be cool we type it TRUSTcompany, but you can just type it any old way you want). From the start, our intent was to pay worship to you, our heroes, our gods.
Enclosed is a copy of our debut album,
The Lonely Position of Neutral, which was released about five years after we formed. It is entirely dedicated to you guys, for being our main inspiration and driving us forward. We worship you so much, we even worked with Don Gilmore who worked on both your records. Pretty cool, huh? When you listen to the album (and I hope you will, although you may be too busy), you will notice that the sound is pretty similar to your own. We even went as far as to appropriate the intro thingy from your hit
Crawling – that’s, like, our favourite song you guys play – and use it in one of our songs. It’s at the beginning of the song
Hover. I hope you guys don’t get mad, we did it as a tribute. We also tried to write our own version of
Crawling, you can check it out on track #2, called
Falling Apart. I hope you don’t think it’s too much of a rip-off. Finally, we have these two songs called
Running From Me and
Figure 8, and the titles are, like, total worship of you guys. On
Running From Me I even try to rap a little, so that I can sound like Mike Shinoda. But it’s you I love, Chester, you’re my main inspiration, dude.
Of course, we didn’t base our
whole album around you. The guys said we needed to have “our own personality”. To me, that’s just rubbish, but hey – it was 3 on 1, so I eventually had to give in. That’s how come songs like
Downfall and
The Fear don’t sound so much like you. Besides, the other guys also like bands like Hoobastank and Staind and Puddle of Mudd, and they tried to put those influences into the music, and it sucks, if you ask me. But hey – I don’t run the band by myself, right? I kept shouting “more Linkin Park, more Linkin Park”, but they wouldn’t listen. In the end, I don’t think those other influences are so bad, they add a little variety to the album, but WE NEED MORE LINKIN!!!
At least that song
The Fear helps us get girls. It’s one of those typical radio ballads, I bet you heard a thousand like it, but I think we did some nice stuff, musically, on that track. It’s also my girlfriend’s favourite song, she says the lyrics touch her so much. And speaking of my girlfriend, she was the one who talked me into having that song
Deeper Into You on the album. I think it’s kinda boring, filler, if you will, but she likes it, so…
The problem is, guys, we get a lot of crap. There’s this reviewer who says we’re just a pale carbon copy of…well, of you guys. He says the album could be worse, but it could also be better if we varied it a bit. He also says the bass is good but the drumming is poor, that’s, like,
so unfair to Jason!! Not all is bad, though, he said he liked
Downfall,
Figure 8 and
The Fear. He also said we sound like another band that’s here on Geffen, I don’t know if you’ve heard of them, they’re called Full Devil Jacket. Some of our friends say we sound like them, too. They play a sort of grungey alt-rock sound, they’re quite cool, actually. We do get a bit from them, especially vocally, but not as much as we get from you guys. That’s why we’re sending the album, as a gift to you. We sincerely hope you like it.
Well, gotta go now, guys. My girlfriend’s calling, I think she wants to go to Hot Topic again. Looking forward to hearing from you, this is Kevin Palmer of Trust Company, signing off.
On behalf of the entire band,
Kevin Palmer
Singer/guitarist for Trust Company
Montgomery, Alabama
There is no rapping.
