Live Review: How To Dress Well

If there were a flowchart for what happens when a show scheduled for 11.45pm on a Friday night doesn’t start on time, it’d be: queue snakes its way through Festival Village > people drink in queue to pass time > the now drunk people enter the venue at ten past midnight > intoxicated people proceed to heckle self-proclaimed “mid-level band from North America”, ie. Tom Krell aka How To Dress Well.

To his endless credit, Krell knew how to take on the particularly mouthy gent front row who, on hearing the singer mention Coldplay jokingly, began to loudly berate said British megaband, only for Krell to suggest that the fan was “sketchy” and he had never feared for his life playing a show, but he did now. It was all in jest though, with intimacy brought on from the tent’s darkness save for the muted colour visuals projected onto the band’s all-white ensembles.

Krell’s voice is a thing of wonder. Alternating between two mics – one set to echo and another standard – his falsetto was effortlessly captivating. He switched flawlessly from convivial banter to serious, and manipulated the room’s energy with ease. He wields and deals heartbreak like common currency, never more clearly than when singing Suicide Dream 1 to perfect silence, but proved equally gifted in inciting body-heaving dancing when he burst out Precious Love. The late-night atmosphere suited Krell’s heart-on-sleeve lyricism, witnessed with the outstanding Face Again meeting wolf-whistles and delighted applause. It was easy to give one’s self over to him, taken in by every word and the breaths between. “This show has been very weird for me,” he stated at the end, under the 1am darkness, “I’d give it an eight out of ten.” Judging by the ecstatic applause bolstering the encore, the audience would’ve agreed.