Just Once - How To Dress Well (E.P. Review)

How To Dress Well - Just Once
8/10

Introducing:

How To Dress Well. To call this R&B would be falling short of the mark. Tom Krell’s deeply soulful first album was R&B had it been thought up by angels, then remixed by aliens. Combining the minimalist haunted echoes of Burial with the tear-stained emotional beauty of Perfume Genius, ‘Love Remains’ is on first listen, with its falsetto vocals and smooth beats, relaxing, therapeutic and tuneful, yet with repeated listens it becomes heart-wrenching; a sonic ghost of loneliness from a life you never lived.

The E.P.

‘Just Once’ takes its name from a poem by the isolationist, Rainer Rilke; an earnest verse stating the singularity of our own individual existence. Bag’o’laughs this ain’t. The extract that Brooklyn philosophy graduate, Tom Krell, posted on the How To Dress Well blog is poignant. It’s difficult to decipher whether the words are appreciative of the preciousness of life, or resentful of it. It’s a gritty subject to write an E.P. about - three tracks of which are entitled ‘Suicide Dream’ - but How To Dress Well addresses the topic with an uplifting sensitivity in the nature of his music. It’s an orchestral E.P. and the sounds are truly heavenly, with choirs, more strings and more piano replacing the ethereal fuzz of his previous album. The first two tracks of this E.P. feature on Krell’s 2010 album, but there’s no real crossover, all four tracks on ‘Just Once’ justify being on a separate record. What does carry over from ‘Love Remains’ is the beauty, and the soul.

Listening to ‘Just Once’ seemed to really make sense of How To Dress Well’s earlier work for me. Often, it’s easy to listen to lo-fi, fuzzy reverb-drenched productions and think that they’re too lazy or poor to make a proper effort, or, worse, that they’re trying to hide ineptitude. It took listening to this E.P. to make it clear to me that the lo-fi nature of Krell’s first release was not doing anything of the sort. Rather than ineptitude, it was hiding a magnificent voice – think Bon Iver and Perfume Genius – and the kind of tender raw feeling that the very best R&B can provide. Krell’s next record will probably see a return to the style of his first, but, thanks to ‘Just Once’, I look forward to listening to it with a finely tuned understanding of what he is capable of.

Sounds like:

Bon Iver, Perfume Genius, James Blake

'Just Once' is available now on How To Dress Well's bandcamp profile, and his blog is a really insightful read too. He'll be visiting the U.K. for a few live shows in August.