In Ghostlike Fading

Description

The five members of My Best Fiend live in Brooklyn, yet the music they create comes entirely from elsewhere: from a spacious, dreamlike world, alternately unsettling and driving. For their debut album on Warp Records, In Ghostlike Fading, their songs feel like reveries, blending beautifully atmospheric keyboards with rocky guitars and plaintive lead vocals. Almost smothered, folk verses turn into thunderous rock choruses, supported by layers of floating vocal harmonies from several friends and guest stars; all treated with a good dose of reverb. On the hallucinatory opening track, 'HigherPalms', MBF creates a kind of modern Phil Spector spirit, an even more dizzying wall of sound. Lead singer Frederick Coldwell's lyrics oscillate between decadence and penance, compulsion and confession, offering portraits of characters who must have sweated through one long dark night or two and -for the most part- have (sur)vived to tell the tale. My Best Fiend takes its name from a 1999 documentary that director Werner Herzog made about his friend, collaborator and occasional nemesis, actor Klaus Kinski. It is a loaded expression, suggestive of the fragile balance of emotions, love and madness, required both in art and in life - and, on top of that, it sounds pretty damn good. The band originally started as a duo, with Kansas native Kris Lindblade on Rhodes piano and Coldwell, who is from Philadelphia, on guitar and vocals. The group expanded with new members, starting with drummer Joseph Noll. They eventually grew into a quintet with the arrival of keyboardist Paul Jenkins and, more recently, bassist Damian Genuardi, a childhood friend of Coldwell's and veteran of the hardcore band The Explosion.