Album Of The Week: How To Dress Well “What Is This Heart?”

Here's something we never really knew before: Tom Krell can sing. Krell has been releasing music as How To Dress Well for something like six years, but he's kept his voice obscured, shrouded in flickering fog, buried in audio murk. Even on 2012's great Total Loss, the moment where he fully and finally stepped away from cultivated mystery, his voice was something of a ghost. But that voice is warm and clear and supple on the new "What Is This Heart?" (The quotation marks are part of the title, even if they look extremely fucking wrong.) The album doesn't entirely do away with the vocal effects that Krell loves, but while he'll occasionally transform himself into a reverb-spectre or a screwed-up ghoul, those moments are in there for contrast, for effect. Most of the time, the music parts and fades to the back when his voice comes in, and that voice comes out sounding sounds stark and intimate. It's not a fluid and instinctive R&B voice, exactly; Krell is not Maxwell. And he's also not a Justin Vernon, using some idiosyncratic internal vocal scale to send his voice into weird and expressive falsetto flights that seem to invent their own melodic language. Instead, he's somewhere between those two poles, riffing on soul and gospel styles but also unafraid to go into impressionistic just-off melodic territory. And that voice isn't the only thing Krell has revealed to the world. "What Is This Heart?" is easily the most emotionally naked, profoundly beautiful collection of music he's yet given us, and the effect of hearing his voice like that only drives these songs further home. He's got things he wants to say, and he's not hiding anything this time.