How To Dress Well — The Anteroom (10/19/18)

7/10

On his fifth album as How To Dress Well, Tom Krell pulls off his most experimental set of tracks yet. The 58-minute long album is intended to be a testament to a dark two-year period in his life. There’s certainly little happiness to be felt within these songs as the artist takes you through a dense set of electronic sounds and samples.

The songs move slow and nothing really breaks past a certain level of energy. Krell’s light and emotive vocals are wrapped up in the obscure electronic landscape heard throughout the album.

“Body Fat” shows the singer’s voice in an open and somewhat deconstructed environment as light electronics seem to barely scratch the surface, leaving room for his poignant vocals to tell the story.

The electronic portions of the album come in the form of the “Nonkilling” and “False Skull” tracks, each with their own designated numbers that don’t seem to follow any pattern.

“The Anteroom” is squeezed between two of these and it’s in this section of music we hear some of the best from this artist.

The album is murky and haunting for the most part but amidst the foggy electronics Krell holds on to a melodic presence.

Closing track “Nothing” caps off the strange album with the most driven and easily digestible track of the group, Krell finally seeming to breach the surface with an energetic hook and brash instrumentation.