Over the course of his last few albums, Tom Krell, the singer behind How to Dress Well, charted a heady course, elevating pop accessibility, R&B crooning, and a dash of electronic experimentation into high art. With his intellectual bona fides established by his never-quite-finished philosophy dissertation and his canny tendency of praising contemporary rappers and 18th century theorists in conversation, Krell was able to brand his viscerally pleasurable music as both “smart” and “cool.” By the time the smoldering, show-stopping “What Is This Heart?” came out in 2014, he had become a poster boy for alternative R&B at a time when critics were not quite as united against the term as they are (I hope) now.
Krell’s seeming intelligence, combined with his curiosity and talent, inspired a generosity in his listeners, a willingness to read great meaning into ostensibly simple lyrics. It’s an attitude that you can see play out in the Genius annotations of the single “Repeat Pleasure” from “What Is This Heart?” The song’s first verse ends with the lyric, “Without your neck to kiss, I was thrown to the night.” Here’s the Talmudic interpretation: “Krell plays with the conventional pop love song’s themes of undying love and eternal happiness in love by recognizing the night of love; loneliness.”
That statement is not wrong, and its generosity is not misplaced. On the contrary, it demonstrates an attitude that should be extended to more musicians, regardless of how much philosophy they’ve studied. There is a lot going on in the Michael Jackson-aping “Repeat Pleasure,” a single that combines thoughtfulness and danceability in a way that presages many of the better songs on Care, Krell’s new album and his fourth full-length as How to Dress Well. The new record contains plenty of lyrics that seem basic to the point of banality, but which our trust in Krell often allows us to recognize as filled with well-considered ideas about the risks and challenges of love, of one’s self and of others.
Take “Can’t You Tell,” the stunner that opens the album. On first listen, it’s nothing more than an enthusiastic sex jam, beginning with the lyrics: “Wanna lay you down and take you right there, take you right there, can’t you tell?” If this were a song by another artist, you might not think twice about the words. But with How to Dress Well we linger, and the lyrics reveal depth: “Take you right there” can be read in two ways, the first passionate and threatening, the other tender and devotional, the two ideas either linked or opposed. And that strange, lingering lyric “can’t you tell?,” signals a kind of plea for connection and consent, emphasized soon afterward when Krell seems to halfway retreat: “Yea I want it,” he enthuses, before insisting, “But I want it when you want it, baby.”
As layered as they can be, these ideas about sex (which are ideas about power, attraction, and respect) wouldn't be as rich were it not for the music bolstering them. As on “What Is This Heart?,” Krell’s voice remains front and center throughout most of Care, which he executive produced with help from guitar-pop maestro Jack Antonoff and the dancehall mastermind Dre Skull, as well as the experimental Canadian musicians Kara-Lis Coverdale and Michael Silver (CFCF). Working with a team of diverse collaborators seems to have allowed Krell to indulge his tendency for rich sonic experimentation while making the most direct music of his career.
This combination of adventurousness and immediacy yields one particularly extraordinary song. “Salt Song,” the track that directly follows “Can’t You Tell,” is a masterpiece, one of the best songs that Krell has made. Produced by Skull, it’s an immaculately structured, near seven-minute pop odyssey about self-care, happiness, and risk that includes a panoply of musical elements that you’d think would repel each other: mournful cello, a ludicrously self-satisfied whistle encasing the vocal melody and a stormy mosh pit of a coda that will be soundtracking the ecstatic ends of Saturday night parties for months if not years to come. The song accomplishes what the best pop does, disguising its own complexity even as the excitement of its many thrills keeps it interesting after half a hundred listens.
Opening as it does with those two songs, as well as the good-but-not-great second single “What’s Up,” Care seems to be carving out territory as a record on par with “What Is This Heart?”, less obviously ambitious but way more fun. And then, Care’s first single, “Lost Youth / Lost You” lands with a dull thud, casting a pall over the rest of the album. The track, produced in part by Antonoff, is almost a full minute shorter than “Salt Song” but it feels infinitely longer with its plodding, faux-insightful chorus about the heart’s confusion and its head-scratching musical decisions; an unearned guitar solo mid-track is made even more miserable when Krell decides to sing over it. It takes a truly empty song to turn a generous listener into a miser, and on Care, “Lost Youth/ Lost You” is that song.
The track is intended to signify a narrative shift from excitement and lust to heartbreak, but it overplays that transition and derails the album, partly because Care’s back half is significantly spottier than its opening numbers, with several of the elements that hurt “Lost Youth / Lost You” showing up repeatedly. Sly, jokey lyrics suddenly come across as blustering, or obnoxiously self-absorbed, while slow-burners including “Burning Up,” “Made a Lifetime,” and “They’ll Take Everything You Have” feel perfunctory. Either their lyrics genuinely lack the intellectual sheen of earlier tracks or we’ve lost our willingness to read meaning into their simplicity.
The odd semi-collapse of Care serves as a reminder of just how fragile an album can be, how vulnerable even the most talented artists are to stumbling over elements like song sequencing, which many might dismiss as a secondary concern. When we listen closely, our perceptions of an artist can change on a dime. And because pop music can be so direct, it’s subject to harsh evaluations: It can be easy to tell when a pop song has missed its mark.
Krell has succeeded in making the simplest, most direct album of his career. But that places him in direct competition with pop music proper, and because Care arrives at a point when many mainstream artists are making such remarkable music, it’s no longer quite as easy to accept on its face the distinction Krell made two years ago, between being pop and being populist. There’s no reason to evaluate him separately from the rest of the pack. Though several of the songs on Care are extraordinary, others are superficial, failing to deliver on the depth that has been such an essential part of How to Dress Well’s appeal. Pop can’t soar if its carrying dead weight, and there’s simply too much of that here for Care to succeed.
