Ethereal 5-piece My Best Fiend announce debut album In
Ghostlike Fading. The brooklynites’ debut is full of soaring guitars,
crackling vocals and beautifully intense lyrics. All of which are able to be
experienced live for New Yorkers on January 27th at Glasslands
with The Hundred in the Hands.
“…a dark, dramatic local outfit that comes off like a less-cryptic Sonic Youth"
- Time Out New York
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. The seven tracks on debut album In Ghostlike Fading feel like reveries, mixing gorgeously atmospheric keyboards with grittier guitars and plaintive lead vocals. 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 Fred Coldwell’s lyrics weave between decadence and penitence, compulsion and confession.
My Best Fiend borrows its name from a 1999 documentary that filmmaker Werner Herzog made about his friend, collaborator and occasional nemesis, the late actor Klaus Kinski. It’s a loaded phrase, suggestive of the tightrope balance of emotions, the love and lunacy, required in both art and life – and, besides, it sounds pretty damn cool. The group originated as a duo, with Kris Lindblade, a Kansas native, on Rhodes piano and Coldwell, who hails from Philadelphia, on guitar and vocals. They ultimately grew to a be a five-piece band enlisting the drumming duties of Joseph Noll, keyboardist Paul Jenkins and, most recently, bassist Damian Genuardi, a childhood buddy of Coldwell’s and a veteran of hardcore band The Explosion.
Though Coldwell supplies the lyrics, the evocative approach of My Best Fiend is the result of a genuine group effort. The material first took shape in the band’s Bushwick rehearsal space. It’s not the setting but it’s the close and constant interaction of the players that dictates the sound. “It was intense making this record,” Coldwell recalls. “It was an emotional time for everyone involved. The process of trying to articulate something that is so complex and important to you in a clear way, from getting the tempo right to finding the perfect aural palette, was pretty heavy”.
My Best Fiend’s hypnotic melodies has garnered comparisons to Spiritualized, and the enveloping wall of sound of Jesus and Mary Chain, even hinting at the sonic build and climax of Explosions in the Sky.In Ghostlike Fading has a loose, impressionistic narrative flow – an undercurrent, really – that develops over the course of its nine tracks, culminating in the seven-minute-plus final track, “On the Shores of the Infinite,” where one can finally, absolutely, glimpse some light at the end of the tunnel.
Integrated into the framework of In Ghostlike Fading, highly personal words become utterly universal sentiments. As Coldwell concludes, “It’s a kindred spirit vibe, a way of not feeling so alone, of keeping some of your ghosts alive.”
Tracklisting:
01. Higher Palms
02. Jesus Christ
03. ODVIP
04. One Velvet Day
05. In Ghostlike Fading
06. Cracking Eggs
07. Cool Doves
08. I'm Not Going Anywhere
09. On The Shores of The Infinite
“…a dark, dramatic local outfit that comes off like a less-cryptic Sonic Youth"
- Time Out New York
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. The seven tracks on debut album In Ghostlike Fading feel like reveries, mixing gorgeously atmospheric keyboards with grittier guitars and plaintive lead vocals. 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 Fred Coldwell’s lyrics weave between decadence and penitence, compulsion and confession.
My Best Fiend borrows its name from a 1999 documentary that filmmaker Werner Herzog made about his friend, collaborator and occasional nemesis, the late actor Klaus Kinski. It’s a loaded phrase, suggestive of the tightrope balance of emotions, the love and lunacy, required in both art and life – and, besides, it sounds pretty damn cool. The group originated as a duo, with Kris Lindblade, a Kansas native, on Rhodes piano and Coldwell, who hails from Philadelphia, on guitar and vocals. They ultimately grew to a be a five-piece band enlisting the drumming duties of Joseph Noll, keyboardist Paul Jenkins and, most recently, bassist Damian Genuardi, a childhood buddy of Coldwell’s and a veteran of hardcore band The Explosion.
Though Coldwell supplies the lyrics, the evocative approach of My Best Fiend is the result of a genuine group effort. The material first took shape in the band’s Bushwick rehearsal space. It’s not the setting but it’s the close and constant interaction of the players that dictates the sound. “It was intense making this record,” Coldwell recalls. “It was an emotional time for everyone involved. The process of trying to articulate something that is so complex and important to you in a clear way, from getting the tempo right to finding the perfect aural palette, was pretty heavy”.
My Best Fiend’s hypnotic melodies has garnered comparisons to Spiritualized, and the enveloping wall of sound of Jesus and Mary Chain, even hinting at the sonic build and climax of Explosions in the Sky.In Ghostlike Fading has a loose, impressionistic narrative flow – an undercurrent, really – that develops over the course of its nine tracks, culminating in the seven-minute-plus final track, “On the Shores of the Infinite,” where one can finally, absolutely, glimpse some light at the end of the tunnel.
Integrated into the framework of In Ghostlike Fading, highly personal words become utterly universal sentiments. As Coldwell concludes, “It’s a kindred spirit vibe, a way of not feeling so alone, of keeping some of your ghosts alive.”
Tracklisting:
01. Higher Palms
02. Jesus Christ
03. ODVIP
04. One Velvet Day
05. In Ghostlike Fading
06. Cracking Eggs
07. Cool Doves
08. I'm Not Going Anywhere
09. On The Shores of The Infinite
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