No Loss At All

On Total Loss, the phenomenal second album for ghostly-R&B reverb-rider How To Dress Well, the grief that bubbled through his 2010 debut LP, Love Remains, and the 2011 EP Just Once, becomes a drowning torrent. As its title suggests, the album is filled with loss; culminating in a stretch in Set It Right where he turns a cliché of R&B —the shout-out roll-call to dead homiez— into his own personal, profound meditation on loss, absence, and grief.

“I didn't conceive it in advance. I didn't think: 'I'm losing things, I should make some music to preserve them',” says Tom Krell, the 27-year-old American ex-pat who makes his How To Dress Well jams in Cologne, where he's working on a doctorate in philosophy. And conversation with Krell, thus, is wonderfully philosophical; the falsetto-singin' sound stylist unpacking grand ideas in the banal setting of the rock interview. “But I am of the mind that almost all art is a way of mediating loss and all things synonymous with loss, of dealing with finitude and mortality. Personally, the last two records, in particular, were just straight-up therapeutic experiences for me, without which I don't know if I'd still be on the phone with you right now.

“I think it's important to deal with loss artistically because it's not often dealt with in a more straightforward, discursive way. A lot of our day-to-day lives we have to pretend that loss is not a real feature of human life, in order to just carry on. And art is a unique space in which one can deal with something like loss, with the right kind of sensitivity, and the right gravitas. It shouldn't be treated flippantly."

And there's an undeniable gravitas to Total Loss, one that runs counter to how Krell was first perceived in the blogosphere. When he started turning out free EPs, in late 2009, in which he hijacked New Jack Swing ballads and dowsed them under wave upon wave of washed-out falsetto vocals, there was a definite perception that, as white intellectual referencing populist black music, that he must be doing so with some degree or ironcy. It was, Krell's music would soon reveal, a dramatic misperception.

“I absolutely loathe irony, and I take pains, whenever I catch myself with an impulse to tell an ironic joke or do something ironic, [to] train myself against it,” Krell offers. “Because I think it's anathema to sincerity and I think sincerity is about the most important thing out there. Taking the time and energy to engage in true, human, existential commitment, that's all we have, and the only reason to wake up in the morning.”

Love Remains picked out the best bits of those early EPs, and minted a sound —which would be called, direly, 'indie-R&B' or 'hipster-R&B' by the world— whose ghostly ambience was instantly imitated in the blogosphere; Krell, like the godfather of new-millennial tape-sheen, Ariel Pink, making music that was all about surface noise. Of course, it was noise with a philosophical bent. “I wanted to make a record that was like the sonic presentation of melancholy,” explains Krell. “The way that melancholy can be really self-enclosed, and the affect can drown out everything in your life, and you want to get out of melancholy and try and scream, but all that happens is a muffled cry, under layers of sadness. Sonically, I wanted to chart that; that's why the record sounds the way it does.”

Total Loss strips away much of the lo-fi murk, creating a cloudy ambience of crystal-clear fidelity; the gentle piano motifs and layered vocals having more in common with Julianna Barwick's choral hymnals than, say, the rapey claustrophobia of The Weeknd, to whom Krell is constantly compared. “Total Loss is more a record about learning how to overcome melancholy in the direction of spiritual regeneration,” Krell says. “That's my longform way of saying: it's not about melancholy, it's about mourning. The main difference between mourning and melancholia, for me, is in mourning you get these head-above-water moments where you get a breath; and then you go back into sadness and you learn from sadness and you can glean energy from pain and lessons from pain, and not drown in the affect.

“If you were to think of them photographically,” Krell continues, comparing his two LPs, “Love Remains would be a bunch of really blurred-out photos of fragments of bodies; Total Loss would have some blurred edges, but it'd also have moments of real clarity. Because mourning is a more hi-fidelity affective state than melancholia, which is just burnt-out, grinding, crunchy depression. It's not like I just went from lo-fi to hi-fi; I would hate for that to be the conception."

Total Loss's match of undeniable beauty with unabashed sincerity makes the 'hipster-R&B' tag seem misplaced at best, idiotic at worst; Krell feeling like this reading of How To Dress Well is a failure to respond to his music's challenge. “People find it challenging to talk about how, on the one hand, [my music] has this gravitas, it's heavy and passionate music, but it uses forms that aren't typically thought to be able to carry those affective payloads,” he says. “One of the things I'm keen to do is try to use a pop form to deal with affects which are more intense, ambiguous, rending, and strange than we thought pop forms could handle. [Yet, although] my music may reference pop, it will never be populist. Because part of populist music is that the form has to be completely un-strange, it has to completely recognisable without any one twinge of strangeness. But, to me, the way loss registers in the world is as strangeness, as something that you can't quite process. Like, why wasn't anyone confounded by the fact that that body was there? Formally presenting that is why I pervert pop forms the way I do."

Krell bought such perversion to local shores, previewing Total Loss —and, memorably, its killer single & It Was U— at a pair of solo shows late in 2011 (“Sydney was amazing, and I remember the Melbourne show being really, really sick”). Krell's keen to bring back his newfound How To Dress Well band (with a live violinist and synth player) in 2013. And, in conversation, he's keen to keep up the endless philosophy.

“I've just, now, done these three records; and they're three very different experiments in charting the affective territory that makes up a lot of my life; my psychic life, my spiritual life,” Krell says, surveying his oeuvre. “I think that art is a magnified, intensified form of general human life. People walking around on the street right now, they have their own aesthetics, and all their little existential commitments which they, if you push them on it, they take quite seriously. Art is just the name for attempting to do that --to express your aesthetic and to develop that existential commitment-- in a reflective and intensified way. For me, sincerity in art is of the utmost importance, because it stands as an emblem for sincerity in life. Emotional honesty in my songs helps me be emotionally honest in my day-to-day life."