In Ghostlike Fading

While the five members of My Best Fiend live in Brooklyn, the music they create resides somewhere else entirely: in a spacious, dreamlike world all its own. On their Warp Records debut, In Ghostlike Fading, their songs feel like reveries, mixing gorgeously atmospheric keyboards with grittier guitars and plaintive lead vocals. Almost hushed, folk-like verses build to ringing rock choruses, bolstered by layers of floaty vocal harmonies from various friends and guest stars, all of it treated to a generous turn of the reverb knob. Hallucinatory opening track, "Higher Palms," achieves a kind of modern, Phil Spector-like spirit, a somewhat woozier Wall of Sound. Lead singer Frederick Coldwell's lyrics teeter between decadence and penitence, compulsion and confession, offering portraits of characters that have sweated through a long dark night of the soul or two and--for the most of them.