How To Dress Well
Lo-fi ambient R&B one-man band By Jim AllenSonic manipulation meets mainstream R&B.
How do you sample both Blackstreet and Coil without coming off self-conscious? Ask Thomas Krell, who has perfected a lo-fi, ambient-R&B sound that combines soulful, falsetto vocal melodies with heady-but-evanescent musical textures in a completely seamless, organic-sounding way. Part of it is an emotional and aesthetic honesty; "I really love ‘90s R&B, it's not a joke to me," he once said in an interview, making it clear he's no uber-ironic hipster intent upon putting his R&B influences between quotation marks. And for all the dreamy, reverb-soaked sonic manipulation involved in Krell's minimalist tracks, his is a naturalist's world, where mouth sounds and furniture-banging become beats, and distortion and crackle are part of the atmosphere. Krell started out releasing singles and EPs himself, mostly online, but the 2010 album Love Remains, on Lefse Records, made the How To Dress Well agenda seem a bit more official.
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