How To Dress Well’s full-length debut “Love Remains” hypnotic and warm but not a stand-out

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3 out of 5 stars

“Love Remains,” is an impressive and hazy album from lo-fi R&B artist How To Dress Well (Tom Krell), hypnotic and dreamlike while maintaining a strong sense of soul and warmth.

Despite essentially being a collection of tracks released on various EPs dating back as far as fall 2009, as well as a handful of new songs, “Love Remains” feels unified in mood and in focus.

Working with almost all electronic instruments, besides the not-so-rare handclap or other percussion, How To Dress Well crafts a dark, melancholy record that still radiates warmth.

How To Dress Well’s music is incredibly difficult to categorize. Is it R&B? Is it electro pop? Is it dubstep? Is it ambient? Though it doesn’t easily fit into any of rather-broad genres, it does borrow significantly from each; it sounds a little bit like Bon Iver and Burial got together to create an electro pop record.

How To Dress Well also uses a lot of different sounds and textures to create thick and hazy ambience in his tracks, which he employs quite wonderfully on the third track, “My Body.”

It begins with a lilting, ghostly loop, Krell’s soulful falsetto just barely breaking through the mix. A stuttering, head-bobbing beat enters the mix, propelling the track forward uneasily.

Recorded on incredibly inexpensive equipment, likely in Krell’s bedroom or some other similarly impromptu locale, “Love Remains” lacks the sheen of music most are familiar with. A lot of the tracks have clipping, where the level of whatever Krell was recording was too loud, resulting in a crackly, distorted sound.

Most bands and artists avoid clipping like the plague, because frankly, it sounds terrible in nearly all contexts. Somehow, Krell manages to pull it off and it adds greatly to the aesthetic of the music, despite initially being alarming.

It’s hard to point to any real stand out tracks despite the well-crafted mood. Many of the tracks sound much alike, resulting in a listen that just seems to float by, rather than really drawing the listener in.

Luckily, the album’s quite short, clocking in at under 40 minutes, making it a good soundtrack for a lonesome nighttime stroll on one of these chilly and damp fall nights.

Fans of Bon Iver and Burial with an interest in R&B music will likely find plenty to enjoy here, though “Love Remains” is unlikely to appeal to any sort of mass audience, due to its low-key and sometimes frustratingly unpolished nature.

At the very least, it makes for good background music, which may or may not be something to really be proud of.