"Are you listening to Ed Sheeran? What's going on?" This was my wife, when she walked in on me listening to the new How To Dress Well album last week. It was a fair question. Just a few years ago, Tom Krell emerged on the internet as a murky enigma. But both in music and in public life, he's gone through a lightening. And now, if anything, we know too much about him. (Depending on how you feel about the lyrics on the new album, Care, we might know way too much about him. More on that later.) Over the years, the reverb has drifted away from Krell's music, and plainspoken warmth and conversational ease have come in. On the new album, he's working with actual pop professionals, guys like Fun./Bleachers crunch-pop mastermind Jack Antonoff and budding Brooklyn dancehall mogul Dre Skull. And while his phrasing and his melodic flourishes are clearly as entrenched in commercial R&B as they've always been, he still sounds more like a guy whose music comments on R&B than a guy who makes R&B. And that means he's got the same basic relationship to black American popular music as a guy like Ed Sheeran does. He's a fascinated admirer, but when he tries to sing like that, you can hear the quotation marks hovering around the words. If anything, now that the reverb is mostly gone, you can hear those quotation marks all the more clearly.