HOW TO DRESS WELL at the Drake (1150 Queen West), Saturday (January 29), 8 pm. $12. HS, RT, SS. See listing.
Don’t call Tom Krell a pop experimentalist. He prefers the term “pop singer.”
Under the moniker How to Dress Well, the 26-year-old philosophy grad student filters the sounds of 90s R&B through hazy lo-fi production to create what he calls “little, isolated pockets of pure expression.”
It’s worlds removed from someone like The-Dream, but Krell claims he’s no less sincere.
“I don’t worry about kitsch, because there’s no reflexive gap between this music and my soul,” he says. “If my music is kitschy, that means my soul is kitschy.”
Like the dozens of free songs on his website, Krell’s debut LP, Love Remains (Lefse), is desolate and mournful, a sexless, cloistered take on vintage soul. To recreate the intensely personal nature of his recordings, he performs in darkness and fog, using only his voice and backing tracks.
“It’s interesting that this approach is the same as that of proper pop singers,” he says. “No one expects Britney to play guitar. I want to be a pop singer, though an uncanny one.”
