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Domino | howtodresswell.bandcamp.com
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“Through the desecration of the body/
A path to escape /
Reveal the face to be a mask /
Made out of centuries of cooling blood /
The head is just a skull /
Is just a skull /
Is just a skull /
Is just a skull”
Oblivion lurks just outside this stunning project's silvery glow.
The Anteroom shifts like molten layers of mercury and chrome, here sliding smoothly past, there eddying together in perfect fractals, beyond a radius of pale light cascading down, down, down into the void.
What awaits us beyond the cosmic foyer?
If the final track on the album, following such subtitles as ‘A Memory, the Spinning of a Body | Nonkilling 2,’ is to be believed, the answer is ‘Nothing’.
A less delicate artist may wallow in the clotting morbidity of The Anteroom's impenetrable poetry, but with the featherlight touch of Tom Krell, all becomes indescribably tasteful.
His inchoate cooing buoys and brightens, latching onto themes and motifs with childlike curiosity, repeating them obsessively until they dissolve and decompose into component shapes and sounds. His downy voice is far too tender to anger, too soft to rage against the glitching chaos that surrounds him. It is inconceivable that Tom could believe anything less than the kindness things, even when muttering “there’s no goal, there’s no God / just take this off of me.” Only he could breathe grace into a line like “there’s still so much pain and anger in your body fat.”
The Anteroom marks a course correction in the How to Dress Well discography. After two impossibly chic offerings, Tom took a step to the right on the rubied but often oversugared pop of 2016’s Care, and The Anteroom bears many qualities of a leftward shift. Rather than being partitioned into individual songs, the album is designed as a continuous fluid soundscape, a concept intriguingly at odds with the boundary suggested in the title. Compound tracks blur together beneath the cover art of a liquid face, and yet at no time does Tom even flirt with pretention.
Bon Iver enthusiasts will find much to appreciate in The Anteroom's cubist electronica. The stalking downbeat and menacing ostinato of opening number ‘Humans Disguised as Animals | Nonkilling 1’ do not constitue a thesis statement, but a diversion: before long they melt into achingly beautiful looplets of silversoft chords. The first act of the album favours ambience over rhythm, only seldom incorporating any kind of beat. Even then, less as an anchor and more as a metronome, a simple tool to mark the passage of time in the dreamy protean mist.
The album’s centrepiece holds at its core a shining, solid detail — a date, nestled in only whispers of context, but a handhold all the same. It is here that The Anteroom shifts gears, dialling up the kinetic energy, spinning faster and faster like a ballet dancer whipping themself into an exquisite frenzy. The title track (such as it is: ‘Nonkilling 3 | The Anteroom | False Skull 1’) settles uneasily into a twitchy groove, but the ever more frequent bursts of stylish dancefloor techno, in particular those that shatter through ‘Nonkilling 6 | Hunger,’ would not sound out of place in any DJ mix du jour.
The album pounds to a climax on ‘Nothing,’ with no trace of irony. It takes a man who knows his worth to position his art as only an introduction to some imaginary greater work.
Concepts and themes, ambitions and memories all blur together into impressionistic swirl that ripples with its own metallic logic — if you strip away the flesh and heat and life, the head is just a skull.
Tom Krell cannot help but uplift. Among the many alternative readings, it is clear exactly what he means when he murmurs:
“When they say face facts, disobey /
There’s singing still left to be done”