Music reviews. CD reviews. Critically hip!

I’m guessing a “laud” is the instrument Cole Coleman is holding on the CD art reproduced above. Honestly, I couldn’t tell when that instrument was used (besides the moments specifically listed on their Myspace page), as opposed to the guitars he’s listed as playing on his collaboration with vocalist/keyboardist Lynn Coleman, but really, it doesn’t matter. “Forward Motion” is an early contender for favorite album of 2007 in my book. Given that I’m usually listening to heavy metal or progressive rock, that’s saying something, as “Forward Motion” is, essentially, a folk album. Davison/Coleman’s magic is built largely on a bed of acoustic guitars, lithe keyboard melodies, and expressive arrangements that transport their everyday lyrical themes to a higher plane.

Even more than the arrangements, it’s the occasional quirkiness that infuses many of the songs on Forward Motion that makes it so interesting for me. Look back at that list of instruments a few lines above, and you’ll see no mention of percussion. But there’s a vaguely martial drum line, punctuated by a drumroll, that shows up intermittently throughout “C’est La Vie.” Their cover of Cat Stevens’ “Moonshadow,” the best song “Forward Motion”, comes across as a lilting bedtime story for children, with an infectious and charming playfulness that happily gets stuck in the listener’s head.   

Lyrically, the duo offers up a variety of situational storytelling. The protagonist in “Castles in the Sand” is looking for that undefined something extra in life, “I want something/ I don’t know what…but I want it/Something more than castles in the sand,” a sentiment we’ve all probably identify with at one time or another. In “Heal,” Davison tells of a person struggling to get beyond a past trauma, “Some say I’ve got a weird personality/nine-tenths removed from reality/Hiding in my room/Where I shut out the pain.”  Both “Cryin’” and the title track are tales of moving on after a break-up, and while the topic is an oft-traveled trail in music, D/C still manages to elicit a sad smile with lines like, “I can still feel it/Here in my heart/But I am not broken/It’s just that I miss the person/You pretend so very well to be.”

The most thought-provoking lyric arises in, “One More Day,” where the character wrestles with what might be a metaphysical question, “Is the end of the road an ending?/Or is it just another place to begin?/There’s no point in worrying about it now/’Cause we don’t really understand.” If it’s talking about death and the afterlife, theologians might take issue with this New Age version of “Don’t Worry Be Happy.” Then again, the lyric could just as well apply to any fork in the road of life, and it’s the one thought on the entire CD that’s resonated most with me.

Forward Motion ends with the appropriately titled, “Our Leaving,” featuring a beautifully harmonized chorus by Davison and Coleman. It’s a rare closing track that accomplishes perfectly what album cappers are supposed to do: bring a disc to a cohesive end, while still leaving you wanting more.