I’m sure Daniel Park probably has a legion of fans somewhere. He’s got a professional look, his voice is pleasant, and his songs are the sorts of creations you could imagine hearing on your local college radio station. The problem is that he doesn’t seem to have anything beyond just being pleasant. So many of the tracks here – especially the first three – have an easygoing quality to them that never becomes fully defined. Park doesn’t seem to care about memorable melodies as much as just sounding soothing. How many mid-tempo, acoustic-based tracks can you sit through before you get itchy? When he goes for something more upbeat (“Shipwrecked”), he still undermines himself with the nice guy factor. Elsewhere, he’s just noodling around aimlessly (“Prelude”) or trying to sound Important (“DTR”), but remains busy going nowhere because of his mere pleasantness. You hear one song on here, and you’ve pretty much heard them all. It gets boring fast, quite frankly, but again this is the sort of stuff that hits are often made of, so it wouldn’t surprise me to see him getting something bigger from this release. (self-released)
