How To Dress Well played Glasslands w/ the Golden Filter (pics), put out another song & video

August 18, 2010

DOWNLOAD: How To Dress Well – “Decisions” (MP3)

How to Dress Well

For a half hour before Tom Krell went onstage at Glasslands Gallery in the early hours of Saturday morning, associates were setting up a white backdrop on which videos would be displayed during his set. All the while, Mr. Krell’s beloved 1990s R&B, from which he draws so much inspiration – Shai, Keith Sweat and so on – played over the room’s speakers.

It was the last time those sounds went unmolested. In his soothing and haunting music Mr. Krell, who records under the name How to Dress Well, takes that music as inspiration (and sometimes as sample source) and stretches it, chops it, squeezes it dry of context. Rather than swing, Mr. Krell’s music crawls. As a singer, some of his inflections are borrowed from his idols, but his voice is purposefully alien, like Antony Hegarty singing at the bottom of a coal mine…

It was less a concert than an indulgent lark, or a total miscalculation. Taken as a whole, Mr. Krell’s catalog is absorbing, dreamlike and jagged at just the right moments. Onstage, though, the songs virtually evaporated in real time, with diminishing returns. Appropriately, it marked Mr. Krell as someone who’d clearly given more thought to the music that preceded him than to his own. -[NY Times]

How To Dress Well headlined Glasslands on Friday 8/13, his first ever US show, with support from The Golden Filter, Glasser and SOARS. Erez unfortunately missed the two openers (one of whom will be touring with Gayngs soon), but snaps of The Golden Filter and How To Dress Well await below.

In other How To Dress Well news, Tom Krell recently dropped a new song for streaming at Pitchfork (“Decisions”, above) and video for his new track “Lover’s Start”. Both are from his forthcoming debut Love Remains, due September 21 via Lefse. That video and a ton of other pics from Glasslands below.

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Golden Filter