On his first album for six years, How To Dress Well sifts briskly through his back catalogue and regrounds his voice in the limpid R&B of his 2010 debut Love Remains, an era-defining record whose endless rains, suicidal ideations and hints of family trauma found a sonic middle ground between The-Dream and Grouper, submerged in fathoms-deep reminiscences of popular eighties and nineties radio acts like Ready for the World, Jodeci, SWV and Boyz II Men.
Paring back some of the textural and conceptual knottiness which characterised The Anteroom, since the release of that album Tom Krell got married and had a daughter, completed his doctoral studies in philosophy with a dissertation on the possibility of a non-nihilistic metaphysics and at the height of the pandemic assembled a crew of collaborators who would help him build towards his sixth solo undertaking, collecting snippets from the past decade while sloughing off some of the physical and emotional fatigue which marked a prolonged tour and the most intense music of his career to date.
I Am Toward You – whose title is the result of one of those portals of discovery otherwise known as a fortuitous mishap, with his wife mishearing the chorus to the Miley Cyrus song ‘Adore You’ – bears traces of all of his past work, from the phantasm loops and breathless prose poems of Total Loss to the open-ended addresses of “What Is This Heart?” whose moments of catharsis are carried by a propulsive, adult-contemporary sheen, and from the synthpop strains of Care which even dabbled in the vogue for tropical house music to The Anteroom whose sometimes crystalline vocal melodies were shrouded in post-punk dynamics, acid atmospheres and industrial sheathes. Yet through an array of soundscapes which run the gamut from sea-struck shoegaze to more rarified dream pop and from gravelly Burial-esque ambiance to angsty shards of nu metal, there is a contiguity through the opening tracks of I Am Toward You and a consistency to Krell’s falsetto which is most redolent of the pitched and piquant Love Remains.
The album opener ‘New Confusion’ serves as a bucolic summation of How To Dress Well’s sound, with its penchant for propulsive and sometimes scurrying percussion plus sweeping synthesizers, the plinth-like verticality of his layered vocal harmonies tilting in the wind as they peer out from an unbridled morass or runaway castles of low-slung clouds. As someone who can remember Krell back in the heyday of Tumblr posting sleek and ebullient R&B, dance-pop and house-oriented mixes while eulogising Visions of the Country by Robbie Basho, Clear Moon by Mount Eerie and R Plus Seven by Oneohtrix Point Never, the second track ‘Contingency/Necessity (Modality of Fate)’ with its juxtaposition of dates and terms feels like the keynote of the piece, contrasting the German words ‘Gesicht’ for face and ‘Geschichte’ for history, and the euphoria of a Mount Eerie concert at the Masonic Lodge at Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles with a more downcast memory of taking psychedelic drugs in the shrine room of a Buddhist monastery, as Krell underwent a period of ‘clandestine and occult meditation’ which included two weeks of total silence.
Possessing a rare knack for writing intimately and inquisitively from other perspectives, on I Am Toward You he returns to familiar themes and concerns around family dynamics and some of the difficulties endured by his brothers, who have Asperger’s syndrome, trauma becoming the site of mystery not because it contains any juicy or gristly material but rather the resiny buildup of necessary things left unsaid. While there is a glitchy quality to several of the tracks, ‘Crypt Sustain’ reiterates Krell’s commitment to Coil-like imagery and post-industrial textures, with the artist citing the influence of an almost eschatological array of sources, from MĆ”ria Tƶrƶk’s work on crypts and ghosts in the intergenerational psyche, Georges Bataille’s collection of essays and lectures The Cradle of Humanity and Jasbir K. Puar’s The Right to Maim which critiques state control and its intersection with concepts of disability to the wall paintings of Lascaux and the heavy metal of Metallica and the old MTV staple Headbangers Ball.
Meanwhile the flashing bulbs of ‘No Light’ with its crackling vocoder and deceptively buoyant melody cut out to give ‘nothingprayer’ a requisite air of solemnity, Krell’s layered choral offering swept up by a rush of synthetic woodwinds, twinkling keys and gusty saxophone squalls before the song takes a country detour through the twanging of steel guitar, ambling down a misty old lane as I Am Toward You maintains a consistency of tone while swapping out the purgatorial murk of Love Remains for lofty entreaties.
‘On It and Around It’ centres on childhood traumas like moving home and the death of a young friend, whose picture at the barbershop prompts questions of identity, the long coda serving to complete the scene. As the title suggests, ‘Song in the Middle’ marks a break in the album, an arboreal field recording with stuttering drums and gospel hollering which briefly calls to mind Lester Bangs and his assessment that the Van Morrison record Hard Nose the Highway contained a second side of songs about falling leaves. Culminating in a clangorous peal of church bells, ‘Gas Station Against Blackened Hillside’ completes the shift with Krell’s voice in the lower register accompanied by the sort of plosive percussion which one might find on a Bjƶrk record.
‘A Faint Glow Through a Window of Thin Bone (That’s How My Fate is Shown)’ bears a flickering piano motif and a rumbling electronic close, with How To Dress Well managing to summon over the course of one track everything from Sufjan Stevens at his most plaintive to Robert Wyatt’s shifting naturalism, the recalcitrant Lou Reed of Metal Machine Music and tracks like ‘forever’ from Charli XCX’s how i’m feeling now era. ‘The Only True Joy on Earth’ is a chain-clinking spiritual about escaping the shackles of one’s own false self, while ‘A Secret Within the Voice’ closes I Am Toward You on a slinkier, soulful note, the repeated sample of the line ‘If there’s no wind in the sky’ turning all of these frayed ends in the direction of sustainable uplift.
Tom Krell elaborates the latest How To Dress Well album in an eight-page, 4,000-word treatise which hones in on the title of I Am Toward You and describes the record as:
a way to comport oneself to someone beloved, for instance, or God, to focus on them with great intention, but in a non-determinative way. It is not the same thing as: I Know You, or I Give You All of Me. It is not the same thing as: I Comprehend You. I Am Toward You is a way of saying: I will allow myself to be pulled by your sway, even if I don’t know where you are heading, even if I don’t know where I myself am, even if I don’t know what ‘you’ are or what that ‘you’ is.
At the same time like pretty much any outstanding work of art the thesis of I Am Toward You can be whittled down to a single phrase, which is always one and the same, a declarative ‘Here I am’ or an anxious, furtive and lovesick over-the-shoulder scrawl on tree bark which through ligatures and ellipses reads ‘I am here’. An artist who has explicitly jostled and hovered between the poles of immanence and transcendence, it sometimes seems as though Krell is using all of these words and constructing vast conceptual apparatus in an eager bid to clarify for the listener that when it comes to his music, the feeling is all that exists.
Krell has already proven to be one of the most poignant lyricists around when it comes to such themes as tenuous self care and tentatively shared intimacies, with the line ‘Now that I’ve known you, the truth could never come without your smile’ from the “What Is This Heart?” song ‘Repeat Pleasure’ capturing wistfully and trenchantly what it means to fall for another person, more than drawn towards them fundamentally reshaped by their presence, a familiar and comforting scent, a shared quip or even a fleeting glance. Through sprouting thickets, I Am Toward You offers another carefully etched chapter, stone tablets aglow amid a clearing in the lush foliage, a resonant heartbeat with an oak-panelled veneer.
