Album Review: How To Dress Well - Total Loss

How To Dress Well, that is Brooklyn's Tom Krell, has been doing the ambient electronic thing since his debut record and with Total Loss he isn't necessarily reformulating his sound, rather tweaking it surreptitiously. On the surface it appears as full of mythic echoes, glacier-paced synths and ambiguous lyricism as ever, but even a passing listen to a tune like the R&B-flecked & It Was You would suggest that HTDW has been spending some time listening to The Weeknd since his last release.

Throughout Total Loss, Krell projects a soulful dissonance in his voice, and it has always been his vocal performances that have drawn attention. His falsetto is incomparable; it should grate thin once you're in the thick of the record, but it shifts and grows with each layer he syncs atop another. There's a detached ethereality to songs like When I Was In Trouble and Say My Name Or Say Whatever, the latter setting the scene with a hushed monologue opener and ambient nature sounds. He can be devastatingly stark too, Talking To You laced with the aforementioned vocal layers, and as the falsetto wavers and almost drops into pace with a deeper voice, every emotion he is trying to convey slaps the listener in the face.

Where last year's Just Once EP was darkly lit with sombre strings, Krell has taken a distinctly more beat-heavy route and Total Loss is all the better for it. Experimental pop fans may have found their record of the year.