Much like Fox News, my intention in writing a review of “What is This Heart?” the third full length LP from “R&B abstractionist” Tom Krell, A.K.A.How to Dress Well, is that I will be fair and unbiased. And much like Fox News, I’m not being serious when I say that—full disclosure, I owe a lot to Tom Krell, so this is an incredibly biased take on the man himself, and his breathtaking new album.
I don’t want to spend a ton of time on this, though; because in the past, with reviews that I’ve done for Bearded Gentlemen, I’ve been chastised by Internet trolls for spending too long with “bad anecdotes” about my personal experiences with the artist in question (see my review of the most recent Hold Steady album.) So I’ll just leave it at this—How to Dress Well means a lot to me personally, more than anyone will probably ever know (save for maybe Tom Krell himself), which is why I feel incredibly #blessed at the opportunity I’ve been presented with here.
The roll out leading up to “What is This Heart?” had been steady, first beginning in March with the surprising release of the album’s first single, “Words I Don’t Remember,” then the official news of a new album, followed by a second single, “Repeat Pleasure,” and finally, a third (and exponentially more serious sounding) song, “Face Again”; each track slowly revealing more about the album, but at the same time, maintaining a sense of mystery.
Simply stated, “What is This Heart?” is a magnificant triumph of the human spirit, and it’s also a culmination of Krell’s work over the last four years—beginning with his humble, lo-fi work on 2010’s Love Remains, moving into his incorporation of orchestral arrangements with the EP Just Once, and then his magnum opus, 2012’s Total Loss. Even in his earliest material, the 80’s and 90’s pop and R&B influence was always there. It was just sometimes buried even deeper than his vocals. But thematically speaking, that kind of unabashed “fun” was overshadowed by the sudden passing of his best friend in 2010—an event that has shaped nearly everything he’s done up until now.
Here, on “What is This Heart?,” you can see how far Tom Krell has grown—not only as a songwriter, but as a performer. No longer are his vocals buried deep in the mix, hidden by layers upon layers of reverb; now they are crystal clear and up front, a statement on the confidence Krell has developed as he’s found his voice and his sound.
While Total Loss was a meditation on how to move forward in the face of devastation, “What is This Heart?” stops short of being a concept album, but is a song cycle (of sorts), taking on the idea of “modern love,” opening with “2 Years On (Shame Dream),” an evocative, dream-like, fragile portrait of Krell’s own family, and then ending with absolutely jubilant strains of “House Inside (Future is Older Than The Past),” where the last words before the record ends are, “This world is such a pretty thing.”
Aside from the larger scale production values—and I mean, this comes off as just a HUGE sounding record at times—one of the other surprises on “What is This Heart?” is the inclusion of the guitar, both electric and acoustic, on many songs. The shift to a much more of an all encompassing sound of Krell’s influences is accurately detailed in a recent Pitchfork profile, where his producer and collaborator Rodiah McDonald, simply stated he thought, “Alt-R&B is kind of an ugly term…because it’s often not that good.” Krell himself has also been mentioning how tired he is of being lumped into same camp with artists like Frank Ocean and The Weeknd, and that he’s kind of bored with the whole R&B act.
The R&B leanings may be inescapable, however, like on the naturally smooth vibes from “What You Wanted,” and the rapid fire delivery on “Childhood Faith in Love,” but Krell is (thankfully) no lothario—on “Very Best Friend,” when he sings, “I want you to have my baby,” he quickly follows that up with “Please don’t be appalled.” And while he’s been very open about the early 2000’s emo bands he revisited while writing material for the record, like Taking Back Sunday and The Starting Line, you can still hear his love of the better known Jackson’s on songs like the dark, angry “Face Again,”(latter-day Michael) and the upbeat, fun “Repeat Pleasure” (early 2000’s Janet.)
Similarly structured to Total Loss, “What is This Heart?” is an emotional roller coaster, which is fitting, given its encompassing ideas, themes and lyrical content. The organization of these songs is painstakingly deliberate—opening up with slow burning, somber tracks, then working towards something much larger, with very few reprieves in between. Specifically the double shot of the frenetic, breathless “Childhood Faith in Love (Everything Much Change, Everything Must Stay The Same),” and the pounding, hypnotic, unrelenting “A Power” is almost too much.
Tom Krell and I are roughly the same age (also we’re roughly the same height too, fun fact), but he is wise beyond his years. On the bombastic closing track, “House Inside,” he sings, “The future is older than the past. Every new day carries the weight of the last,” one of the lyrics on “What is This Heart?” that resonated the deepest with me. In a recent interview with Spin, he gives a response to the somewhat positive note the album closes on that seems like it was lifted from one of Matthew McConaughey’s monologues on True Detective—“I always think of this Wallace Stevens quote where he says, ‘The world is ugly and the people are sad.’ And I think that’s at least 98 percent right. We live in a godless, nihilistic universe. That’s true. There is no God. There’s no ultimate cosmic reason for our being here. So if there’s no real reason for our being here and 98 percent of our being here is starvation and violence and sadness, then really tracking that two percent where it’s possible to make that affirmation is enormously hard. It’s really hard.”
Very few artists can do what How to Dress Well does—and that’s make good pop music for adults. It’s interesting, emotional, beautiful, honest, devastating, fun (I mean, he samples telephone hold music on “Precious Love”), well written, and infectious all at the time same time. But more importantly, Tom Krell makes music that is affirming, and as he has so many times before, on “What is This Heart?,” he lays is soul bare in an attempt to create something meaningful and real, and to find the few fleeting moments of hope, that there may be in this awful, ugly, sad world.
Rating: 5/5