NEW DIRECTION

HOW TO DRESS WELL

Care Tom Krell has spent his entire career singing about togetherness while consciously putting distance between himself and listeners. Though that gap has slowly been closing over the course of three LPs, Krell’s latest as How to Dress Well offers a rapid acceleration of this trend. Gone is the vocal reverb and echo, along with any sense of hesitation. Here, Krell makes his intentions known immediately with album opener “Can’t You Tell,” singing clearly that he wants to “lay you down and take you right there.” That directness pervades Care, an album that takes the project in a more pop-oriented direction with the help of a diverse array of producers, like dancehall beatmaker Dre Skull and experimental electronic musician Kara-Lis Coverdale. Throughout the record, the singer strives for a place or feeling that’s just out of reach, creating the tension that propels the album forward. Once branded an altR&B crooner, How to Dress Well has proven to be a far more enduring project than many would have thought. In Grimes’ wake, plenty of artists making mainstream pop are trying to weird up their sound, but Krell seems more interested in using pop’s form as a vehicle for less commercially viable ideas, throwing out the playbook with each release. His ability to make sonically adventurous, emotionally rich pop has made him a perpetually welcome presence in a crowded field. ( Weird World, weirdworldrecordco.com)

WHY MAKE VOCALS THE FOCAL POINT?

I was extremely moved, when I was making Love Remains, by the music that I made. I’m not moved like that anymore. I’m just at a different place right now and I don’t want to hear a lyric that is wilfully obscure, or a voice that is wilfully buried. I was really inspired by what Oneohtrix Point Never was saying around the R Plus Seven record: It’s really easy to make something beautiful with a ton of reverb and delay, it’s very difficult to stand naked and look beautiful.

WHAT DID YOU LEARN ABOUT YOURSELF MAKING THIS?

When I was too young to know better, I over-identified truth in art with a certain masculine seriousness that assumes that pleasure, and fun and goofiness and tenderness and unrestricted sadness, that these things are not connected to truth. The things connected to truth are serious deliberation, shitty male vibes. Like a brooding seriousness. I’m so unmoved by those things now. IAN GORMELY