Total Loss by How To Dress Well [REVIEW]

I confess to first having my attention drawn to How To Dress Well when he (Berlin-based New Yorker Tom Krell) guest-appeared on the wonderful Active Child album – evidently I missed the 8.7 pitchfork review of his 2010 debut. (Mock me now, haters! Ha!)

So, anyway, I was very excited, though, to get my ears around his sophomore record. And my ears are very grateful. But they are crying. Krell’s unabashed ability to express his sentimentality disarms cynicism and irony in a world of 120 character expressions and sound-bytes that makes this record stand out. It’s achingly and gorgeously sad. Tom suffered some personal tragedy and, as great artists tend to do, took his art and used it to, at least in some way, express it. And it’s this humanity and his sentiment that burns and shines deep in the records ether; like an emotional core in a giant gaseous planet of left-field r’n'b.

RATING : GREAT

Cheese on Toast is phasing in a new album ratings system. I have always struggled with a numerical scale; it feels so finite and arbitrary. So the new scale looks like this : FREAKIN’ AWESOME / JUST AWESOME / REALLY GREAT / GREAT / GOOD  / PRETTY COOL / NOT BAD / COULD BE BETTER / PRETTY BAD, ACTUALLY / NOT RECOMMENDED FOR EARS