On The Edge Of A Dream is the debut album from Portland band Caught In Motion. The record offers up ten tracks of delicate pop with piano leads and smooth vocals. Consistent, cohesive, and often very pretty, Dream is a solid effort that hints at the potential for even more.
Lead vocalist Banah Graf’s voice bears an almost distracting resemblance to Ben Folds, and his piano playing encourages the comparison. However, Caught In Motion takes a different approach to pop than Folds does, eschewing bombast or melodrama in favor of something subtler and more dependent on nuance. Each song is smooth and polished, like a river stone, and they flow seamlessly into each other, leaving you at track ten almost before you realized you had reached track two.
Sometimes Dream is perhaps too nuanced: while “Reaching Out” hints at the gothic mood of fellow Portlanders The Decemberists, the potential of this sound is never quite realized. “Why Can’t You Forget,” one of the best tracks on the album, adopts the loud-quiet-loud format that has propelled other pop bands, such as Weezer, to great success. (See the brilliant “Say It Ain’t So”.) The loud, though, seems to want to be a little bit louder; with a dozen decibels more worth of drums, it could’ve been not just big, but arena huge. The vocal acrobatics and the fuzzy guitars do add delightful texture, though, and it remains an enjoyable song.
All in all, On The Edge Of A Dream is not a bad album, if not a great one. It definitely has its place: it would be perfect for long summer afternoons, starry nights, or other quiet, languid times that call for a dreamy background track. In addition, the fact that Caught In Motion often comes so close to doing something really remarkable gives me hope that next time around, they will. This is, after all, their first album, and there’s nothing wrong with having a little growing to do. Maybe they are, in fact, on the edge of something — something great.
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On The Edge Of A Dream can be streamed in its entirety here, and is available for purchase on iTunes or the band’s MySpace page.