For nearly 15 years, How to Dress Well has resisted simple pleasures. On Love Remains, Tom Krell's 2010 breakthrough under the pseudonym, smothered R&B tunes in thick production, cloaking simple sounds with reverb, distortion and disjointed lyrics about death and desire. Even at his most accessible, Krell's approach to pop music was outrageous. His two best albums of 2012 Total loss and of 2014 “What is this heart?” twisted songs that Whitney Houston could have sung into crazy, ethereal gems, like fantastical Top 40 hits met in a dream. A skilled deconstructor, he dismantles familiar forms and pop archetypes, redefines their essential parts and reveals labyrinths buried beneath.
Krell's latest album, I'm Against You, it's his first release in six years and undoubtedly his hardest. He constructs a idiosyncratic world of recordings and ephemera, muffled soul singing and glitchy guitar samples, mournful melodic detours and humming electronic drops. It's often joyful and self-consciously beautiful, yet its hooks are elusive—you won't find a new “& It Was U” or “Repeat Pleasure” here. Lead single “No Light” is dominated by a harshly distorted lead riff that offsets the magic of its dance-pop backbeat, vocals overwrought to the point of erasure. Even when his choices are less gritty and more melodic—like the straight-ahead “On It and Around It” or the a cappella-like anthem “The Only True Joy on Earth”—the songs have an opaque, murky quality. They seem to creep their way into transcendence, as if hovering in memory and only now announcing their presence.
But like any How to Dress Well project, I'm Against You she asks to be accepted on her own terms, free of prejudice. A series of breathtaking moments offer immediacy even during intense experimental stretches that might otherwise keep you at arm's length. Krell uses his raw falsetto less than in the past, but still uses it to strong effect on “nothingprayer” and “A Secret Within the Voice.” Standout “Song in the Middle” is a slow build-up of loops that evokes a surge of powerful emotions—angst, longing, hard-earned optimism. “A Faint Glow Through a Window of Thin Bone (That's How My Fate Is Show)” features a string and piano breakdown that's as moving as anything on the How to Dress Well catalog. Even in its quietest passages, I'm Against You it discards clean, predictable patterns to quiver and woozy with obsessive intensity.
In an eight-page, 4,000-word blurb Krell wrote to accompany the album, he describes it as a “transcendent poetic effort of great contemplation, confusion, ignorance and prayer… inhabited by birds, stones, contingencies, confusion, God and fate, the which undertakes the task of becoming oneself, the transmission of trauma from generation to generation, the meaning and experience of art and music, the mediation of all these by technology”. Krell's lyrics are both impressive and disorienting, laced with social critiques, psychoanalytic formulations, poetic wordplay, Greek myth and Bataille references. “I guess I once confused the German word for face with the word for history/Just change one little letter, look at your fate in the mirror,” he sings on “Contingency/Necessity (Modality of Fate),” a meditation on the interplay between historical narrative and personal experience.
from our partners at https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/how-to-dress-well-i-am-toward-you
