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. "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.