In Ghostlike Fading

Description

The five members of My Best Fiend live in Brooklyn, yet the music they create comes from somewhere else entirely: from a spacious, dreamlike world, by turns unsettling and captivating. For their first album on Warp Records, *In Ghostlike Fading*, their songs resemble reveries, mingling magnificently atmospheric keyboards with rugged guitars and plaintive lead vocals. Almost stifled, folk verses transform into thundering 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, "Higher Palms", 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 would have sweated through a long dark night or two and – for most of them – have (survived 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's a loaded expression, suggestive of the fragile balance of emotions, love, and madness required in both art and life – and, what's more, it sounds pretty darn good. The band originally started as a duo, with Kansas native Kris Lindblade on Rhodes piano and Coldwell, who hails from Philadelphia, on guitar and vocals. The band grew with new members, starting with drummer Joseph Noll. They eventually expanded to a quintet with the arrival of keyboardist Paul Jenkins and, more recently, bassist Damian Genuardi, a childhood friend of Coldwell's and a veteran of the hardcore band The Explosion.