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. On hallucinatory opening track, “Higher Palms,” My Best Fiend 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 – lived to tell the tale.
