Tom Krell's debut LP as How to Dress Well, last year's Love Remains, consisted mostly of songs gathered from numerous digital EPs he'd been posting on his blog. Love Remains picked the best of these tracks and arranged them into a set that felt like a coherent outline of the project: ethereal home recordings, more about mood and texture than lyrics or melody, that draw from mainstream pop and R&B but transform some of the formal qualities of those genres via a lo-fi, "feel"-oriented setting. Since then, critics have discussed Frank Ocean, the Weeknd, and other artists alongside How to Dress Well to define a loose trend of the young, urban hip embracing a version of R&B, but to me Krell's music has always sounded more like an art project and less like something that truly touches on what is, after all, a supremely populist (and popular) genre. Without the crackling digital distortion, words buried under a mountain of cheap reverb, and blurred visual imagery, How to Dress Well's songs are skeletal, to say the least.
As good as Love Remains was, there was a distinct feeling of "Where can this project go next?" It's a common question these days, when adopting a ready-made style is as easy as installing a new Tumblr theme and bands are sometimes more about abstract ideas than individual expression (which shouldn't be taken as a criticism). "How to Dress Well" is the "thing," in other words, not any individual song or record; the project itself is where the expressive possibility lies. So how has that project changed? And does it need to? To his credit, Krell took the right tack here by putting out a low-key, limited release built around a different concept, something that in no way feels like a follow-up. Just Once is a four-song EP that collects two previously released tracks bearing the name "Suicide Dream", adds a third with that title, and throws in a new version of "Decisions", what I would argue is Krell's best track to date. All four songs have been recorded with a string quartet, and the set was inspired by and is dedicated to a friend of Krell's who passed away.
There's something a little funny about the idea of going from blown-out lo-fi to a freaking string quartet in the space of a single release. But the truly weird thing about Just Once is how the songs once rendered by Krell's presumably cheap home production don't sound all that different given the conservatory approach here. His vocals are still coated in reverb, the intertwining harmonies still given the same arrangements, and it turns out that those elements are what make How to Dress Well's sound distinct. Just Once still feels slightly crude and handmade, despite the instrumentation involved, and there's no mistaking it for anyone else.
The old and new "Suicide Dream" tracks work well together to evoke a sense of yearning and loss. And "Decisions", with its waltz-time shuffle and signature pause every fourth measure, is still glorious, the sound of a song drawing fuzzy, abstracted versions of about five different emotions and swirling them together into one grand whole. Just Once also serves as a potential argument that How to Dress Well is best in short four- or five-song bursts, the way the first few EPs arrived-- you get the feeling Krell's songs evoke for 18 or 20 minutes, and then you move on. Sure, there's no avoiding the fact that some of these songs are appearing for the third time. The nagging "what now?" question isn't going away. But it can be filed away for later.
