::ALBUM REVIEW::

Acoustic worship has showed its interest in gospel music in the last couple of years with artists like Israel Houghton and Donald Lawrence and have helped uncover new sounds in the music world. But of course, it is surely difficult to place layers of Hillsong's music over strong gospel foundations while keeping the interest of gospel music listeners. But some are trying very hard to do just that. Out of Springfield, Ohio comes a refreshing gift of music from Amante Lacey under the independent umbrella of Tonya Baker's Bakehouse Music Group and they are attempting to rewrite some of the familiar things with what is modern and now on their debut collection called "The Scale Of Worship". While the instrumentation is beautifully constructed on this project and sends off progressive arrangements around simple melodies, "The Scale Of Worship" lacks the excitement of punchy gospel projects and falls more into the acoustic bag of friendly, over-popularized praise-and-worship music.

"All For You" opens this set of studio cuts with an Israel Houghton-like acoustic drive from Lacey on the guitar. Strangely, most of the rest of the instrumentation (including string arrangements) along with the background vocals are brilliantly done but it's hard to digest all of the action at the same time since all of the instrumental components of the song are layered at the same volume. This creates a difficult process for listeners; giving off the impression that too much is going on. Towards the vamp, the song jumps into a groove that showcases a celebration of abundant dance music. This helps out with giving the song the edge it needs to stand out. Jonathan Dunn's "Free" has an obvious connection with Stevie Wonder 80's sounds and doesn't use the acoustic guitar...nice choice here by the way here. It has a punchy energy to the track that will satisfy the tastebuds of gospel lovers, even though there's a lot of changes and transitions on board. Dunn, whom has written for Marvin Sapp, also helps to create "Victory" to the mix, along with Juante Hall, that builds off of soft guitar renderings and a guest lead vocal appearance from Tonya Baker. It almost has a nice reminder of the early 1990s sound that we have a hard time forgetting due to its good-feeling posture. Listen to "Victory" with all of its instrumentation and take into consideration the development of the song's structures and you might think you are listening to Bobby Brown's "Every Little Step". Concluding the bag of nice tunes, "We Give You Worship" is a nice intimate worship song that flows just right with a nice melody and takes a ride of modulations towards the end.

Most of the album is acoustically driven of course and tends to overshadow most gospel images. Songs like "Adoration", "Give Me A Chance" and Chris Tomlin's "Famous One" all feel like Hillsong creations and envelop around ideas that CCM artist Anthony Evans may would experiment with. These songs ironically don't have strong melodies (except for "Famous One"), but are crafted around the musical concepts best expressed in the world of pop-oriented worship music. Possibly this is the audience Lacey and his crew desires to gravitate towards. Since the bulk of the material is acoustically driven and is crafted after that sound, signature gospel moves are lost.

Just ten tracks in all, it's kind of hard to seriously like or enjoy this album all the way through without any signs of disappointment. If you are a lover of various music genres, you may get through this without much trouble. While Lacey has an incredible register to showcase and delivers with intense, passionate vocals, he needs to find his own authentic sound and focus on it without dabbling around with multiple musical foundations. Hillsong material doesn't have R&B, jazz or soul foundations - it just doesn't fit. And it probably never will. Mixing musical worlds like that, without the appropiate foundations, are very uncomfortable decisions for an artist. We just hope Lacey will remember this when attempting to piece together a project for established gospel audiences in the near future.