Music of Synergia – Fading Echoes

The useful part

Grief, as any songwriter worth his advance knows, is the cheapest rhyme and the hardest thing on earth to earn honestly. Most who reach for it end up with something maudlin, a greetings-card sentiment dressed up in reverb. Valerian Steel, working here under his Music of Synergia alias, does not make that mistake.

How it works

• "Fading Echoes" arrives less like a single than like a house you wander into after the funeral, when the mourners have gone home and the furniture still smells of somebody who isn't coming back.