Acoustic Phases - We Are The Key

Hear The Track Here

Acoustic Phases is a new name to me from Mixposure, where I picked up this review, and is the bandname for US based acoustic (drrr) musician Scott Rode. Now, as always when downloading tracks I skim over the artists website where I found the first major plus point in Scott's favour. The man, it has to be said, has taste. Hold on a minute, let me put my gearhead hat on. A year or so ago I managed to snag the best acoustic guitar I have ever owned, thanks to a friend of mine who sadly passed away recently. I am the proud and very smug owner of a Takemine EG520S, one of the wide bodied variety and it is a remarkable guitar for its (quite low) price. Scott, lucky so and so, own two of these beauties; the better version of mine and a classical model. All of which contribute to his music which, he informs us, he has been honing and refining for years. There's a familiar tale eh? These days I only play acoustically to please myself, having become much more adept at recorded sound, but my own origins are in this field and I know what works. Suffice to say that armed with all this extra baggage I waited forlornly for the track to come up in the review schedule.

So, now you know. I can be every bit as much of a guitar geek as any one of the Mixposure crowd and I wear my chatroom barfly uniform with some considerable pride. Scott brings the classical to the fore with We Are The Key, a fairly basic folk track when all is said and done. I admit that I have a very high bar when judging material of this kind, both through my own experience and - more importantly - my wide knowledge of what Scott's peers are up to. My taste in acoustic music of this type has admittedly been coloured by just how many good guitarists/singers/songwriters there are out there. Just the merest scan of (say) the last four years of my roundup review (The Stevies) will give you a mind-numbingly good selection of them, and I'm here to tell you that bar is set impossibly high. So, I guess. you can only judge songs on what they are. What We Are The Key contributes to the argument certainly isn't bad, just not as good as some of its competitors.

It sounds like I am damning here with faint praise, but I'm not. If there were nothing to scale this against other than its appeal and likeability then this would count as a decent track, and a reasonable song - if a little dry in both content and delivery. Certainly if you are of that mindset, the lyrical content being about the events predicted for 2012, you would find something much more interesting than me. I assume Scott recorded this straight to webcam and that there is a video lurking somewhere that may shed some more light on the track. I definitely think a track benefits from having a visual element attached to it, especially when this kind of material is played. It hasn't done Kappa Danielson and Kristi Starr any harm and they do exactly this kind of stuff. Mind you, they are also a bit on the gorgeous side and I'm sure that Scott Rode is a very nice man and all that... All of which is way, way way too much personal information for this page....