VARIOUS RELEASE DATES: SEPTEMBER 21ST // OCTOBER 19TH // 31ST 2010


Love Remains is an annoying record to discover. There, I said it. Like so many new bands who promise something different, How To Dress Well have grown in the year since their debut was released through massive support from those grossly influential online journals who shall remain unnamed. As a matter of fact, How To Dress Well are more well-known for their stage name than the music that has made this one of the biggest sleeper hits in recent memory. I would also care to place a bet that for every five people who have heard of them, only one or two will have taken the time to listen to Love Remains. This could be down to the fact that their moniker ranks alongside Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly as one of the more audacious band names in recent memory. It could also be down to the fact that, as I just mentioned, Love Remains can be a frustrating, often evasive listening experience. Therefore, it’ll probably come as a surprise when you begin to fall for its charms.


How To Dress Well is the creation of Brooklyn-based Tom Krell who, when not producing his murky breed of lo-fi R&B, is consumed by his academic work in philosophy and poetry. So the guy’s street wise and book smart. So what? Well, it’s an interesting position to be in and undoubtedly casts his work in a new light when this knowledge is made clear. Surely this means he knows what he’s doing, if we’re to follow a system of interpretation as beneficial to how we can better understand something? If he’s a philosopher as well as a musician, which aspect should take precedent over the other as the more critical when it comes to evaluating Love Remains in light of how experimental it is? And make no mistake, this record is pretty experimental stuff. It’s the sole reason to why so many have found it such a difficult sound to grasp, because it never seeks to define its boundaries. It’s not easy to say why you like it or, indeed, why you may dislike it. It just is.


To move forward we sometimes have to look back, and looking back is exactly what Krell does on Love Remains. Since revealing his love of old-skool R&B, Krell has crafted a collection of songs that play like faded memories of the golden age of R&B from two decades ago, in its infantile stages before it expanded and ultimately dominated US markets in the subsequent decade. The sound of early frontrunners like Mary J Blige and R Kelly are evident in the soulful element of the vocal melodies on tracks such as You Won’t Need Me Where I’m Goin’ and the celestial My Body. These songs could be mistaken for deploying cheap samples, but on further inspection they reveal their originality: Krell plays with vocal loops and distortion to evoke this feeling of a time long gone. It feels as though those original monster hits which dominated Billboard in the early Nineties have been playing continually, and the process of degradation and crumbling is all that’s left. And yet it remains a rich, fully-textured sound. Krell is particularly adept at imbuing his production aesthetic with thick layers of distortion and reverb on tracks such as Walking This Dumb and You Hold The Water, simultaneously fleshing out his ambitious scope and paying homage to the distinction of those hallmarks for which he holds so much reverence.

If the heavy distortion of these vocals plays out as a ghostly reminder of R&B’s glory days, it also doubles as a way for Krell to purposefully mask the lyrics. For the most part, Love Remains is garbled to a point which saturates the vocals and how well the listener can decipher them, almost encouraging the idea of humming along to the words when you’re not sure what they actually are or, in most cases, making up totally new words as a result of this confusion. The process of recreating words in song can be incredibly nostalgic of that childhood sensibility, when learning the lines to your favourite pop band’s lyrics felt like rehearsing for a school production. There’s a clear pop aesthetic at work here too, all the more surprising considering how vague and lithe the majority of Krell’s melodies are, and proof enough that the overall tone of a melody (and how it wavers) is what sticks in our minds long after a song has stopped playing. It’s important, also, to note the facts: Love Remains is mostly a collection of cuts from the numerous EPs that Krell put out in the year before its release, so already there’s a sense of discontinuity here. Yet this process of cut and paste also works to create an entirely new narrative. Ready For The World remains the definitive track on this record, since it comes after the introductory piece of You Hold The Water, setting a blueprint for the structure of the rest of the album, with predetermined rules as to how far each song can progress. As a result, Love Remains stays within the lines of its own construction, but that’s not to say there’s nothing new here to discover with each subsequent listen.


The truth is that Love Remains is a patchy record, but it’s also frequently brilliant. It remains one of the more interesting records to be released in 2010 not because it plays on a sort of reconstituted nostalgia (that’s happening everywhere now, from Tiger & Woods to Ariel Pink), but because it does so with a seriousness that incorporates the lo-fi element as minimally as it does effectively. Since its release one year ago, I’m reminded more of The Weeknd, the Toronto-based creation of Abel Tesfaye, who has taken the muted, slow-motion solitude and introspection seemingly so integral to this appropriation of contemporary rhythm and blues on House Of Balloons, an idea expanded on further yet for his recent Thursday mixtape. Yet where Tesfaye focuses more on an emotional reaction to various aspects of a youth culture of which he’s very much a part, Krell seeks to observe from a fixed vantage point. Love Remains never seeks to impose an ideology or stultify its audience with messages. For all its incoherence, it’s surprising how seductive it can be, mitigating its dreary misery in favour of the one thing it succeeds in providing in abundance: timeless soul and warm hooks.