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$11.99 CD
$9.99 MP3
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HOW TO DRESS WELL
Total Loss
(Acephale)
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Ironically, when this album came up in my iTunes, Big John Hamilton's vintage southern soul tune "How Much Can a Man Take?" showed up for the crying party as well. I had to chuckle to myself a bit when I saw it, as in essence Tom Krell's ghostly subversive almost-R&B begs this question time and time again. His solid yet uneven debut album Love Remains was more of a critical curiosity than a darling, but the lo-fi slow jam abstractions, punctuated by Krell's awkward, sincere falsetto, was an audacious enough idea in 2010 to garner praise from plenty of enthusiasts. Total Loss hits the shelves post-Channel Orange, with the mainstream R&B world temporarily enamored with the minimalist, downer abstractions of a complex, bisexual African-American 20-something; what's a nerdy, Caucasian, graduate student to do? Thankfully, Krell hunkers down and stays the course. Truth be told, the R&B wasn't really the meat of the whole thing. Krell loves the pain of love, and his music is about conveying those emotions through performance -- something he has in common with many of his heroes who happen to be R&B stars, like Aaliyah, R. Kelly, Beyonce, Keith Sweat, Gerald Levert and Al B Sure; in R&B the vocal performance trumps the lyrical content (and everything else) all day, every day. Paraphrasing KRS-One, How to Dress Well is Krell's attempt to break R&B "down to its very last compound." He's not the first to try to do that and he's not necessarily great at doing it, but the results are more than intriguing and a lot more compelling than one would think.
If Love Remains was a conceptual album about the complexities of chronic melancholia, then Total Loss seems to be a conceptual album about the sharp directness of the pain of loss and how one deals with it. It's an uncomfortable thing to see someone struggle with loss and the fallout of it; beauty and inspiration can spring from the pain, but it ain't pretty. Krell collaborates with xx engineer Rodaidh McDonald here, a man who knows a thing or two about the importance of sentiment and open space. The album opener, "When I Was in Trouble," is a sparse three-chord piano ballad that pushes that shaky falsetto up front and center. It's jarring, awkward and confrontational in all of its flaws (like the pain of loss), and a markedly different approach to the ghostly abstractions of Krell's earlier recordings. Songs like "Cold Nites," "& It was U," and "How Many" aim for the fully realized R&B trappings of his aforementioned heroes and they're a bit uncomfortable to listen to on their own, simply put, because he's overreaching. But tracks like "Ocean Floor for Everything," "Say My Name or Say Whatever" and the string-laden instrumental centerpiece "World I Need You, Won't Be Without You (Proem)" are heartbreaking in their simplicity in a way that I can't quite put my finger on, which I suppose is the point of the whole thing, right? This might be the first record I've listened to in a while that simultaneously made me want to turn it off and turn it up; I let it play through, and then I started it again. It's not pretty, but it just might be beautiful -- I haven't decided yet, but it's definitely worth hearing. [DH]
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