★★★★★
How to Dress Well's What Is This Heart? opens with a few aimlessly struck piano notes building into a plinked melody followed by somber crooning over gentle acoustic strums. This about sums up the skeletal "2 Years On (Shame Dream)," a mournful tale of familial and individual rupture. It's the album's most vulnerable song and also its weakest, the layering of earnest emoting and vocal trills over such sparse instrumentation leaving little to focus on aside from singer Tom Krell's strained,...
- www.slantmagazine.com
2014-06-06
★★★★★
Throughout his short career, How to Dress Well's Tom Krell has already garnered the tag of being ethereal and ultimately transcendent. On Love Remains, the fragments of his life were adorned with stellar hooks ("You Won't Need Me Where I'm Goin'") and moving, tremendously great melodies ("Endless Rain"); each song, paired with his voice, made for a winning combination...
- www.adequacy.net
2012-12-07
★★★★★
The music of Tom Krell, aka How To Dress Well, has been referred to as 'Avant-r'n'b', and that's a pretty good description of the sounds on his latest, Total Loss. He is one of several artists pushing the contemporary r'n'b envelope, taking a soaring falsetto with a strong 90's influence and drowning it in noise and reverb. Think The Weekend/Frank Ocean/James Blake...
- www.theaureview.com
2012-10-08
★★★★★
Brooklyn-based artist Tom Krell brings sharper songwriting and greater clarity to his second album while still delivering a haunting, reverb-drenched blend of spectral R&B; and minimalist electro-pop with ethereal synths, echoed, bass-heavy beats, occasional strings and distant, ghostly voices and other mysterious half-heard sounds accompanying Krell's delicate falsetto vocals.
- kexp.org
2012-09-24
★★★★★
After releasing a few EPs, this German-born, Brooklyn-based artist (aka Tom Krell) offers up a sublime debut full-length of spectral R&B;, using lo-fi, speaker-blasted production to create murky, ethereal soundscapes of haunted synths and glitchy beats, with Krell's ghostly, achingly beautiful falsetto flitting in and out of the reverb-drenched mix on poignant, deeply melancholy songs that bridge the gap between Burial and Bon Iver.
- kexp.org
2012-09-24
★★★★★
How To Dress Well's second full-length release, Total Loss, is, from the first track onwards, a confessional that draws you along with a line of thread until the album ends and you're left standing in an immense mass of string. Tom Krell knows how to rouse your expectations and make you really wait for it by introducing each track as a seemingly simple song that inevitably blooms into a heavily textured R & B heartbreaker...
- filtermagazine.com
2012-09-24
★★★★★
"The only bad part about flying is having to come back down to the fuckin' world," says the kid on the sample opening "Say My Name or Say Whatever," the third track on Total Loss. It's followed by a splash--the coming down, presumably, in the form of a water landing...
- www.undertheradarmag.com
2012-09-24
★★★★★
Total Loss's cover art, a picture of a death mask-like sculpture of experimental singer-songwriter Tom Krell's face, is strikingly absent of any morbidity, perhaps due in part to his serene expression and the misty, pink backdrop. And despite its title, his sophomore album under pseudonym How to Dress Well is rather celebratory, an assurance of undying devotion and life-affirming affection that's remarkably free of conflict...
- www.slantmagazine.com
2012-09-20
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