Staff Reviews

How to Dress Well - What is This Heart?

Review by Sam Cleeve

“What Is This Heart?” feels like How To Dress Well exploring the musical fringes of what How to Dress Well can be.»

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Arriving two years after the haunting, glacial neo-soul of 2012's much-loved 'Total Loss', 'What Is This Heart?' is the next step in Tom Krell, AKA How To Dress Well's unique and searching artistic trajectory. Its twelve songs were conceived and written during months of grueling international touring and realised with producer Rodaidh Mcdonald in a Berlin studio in the height of summer 2013. The result is an ambitious 21st century pop album that takes influence from artists as varied as Prince, Bill Callahan, Burial and Tracy Chapman as well as Krell's oft-cited R'n'B influences - managing to exist in a perfectly judged hinterland of fragility, sexuality and overwhelming joy as a result. An album that celebrates the healing power of American pop music in all its various guises, 'What Is This Heart?' once again asserts Krell as an artist of great courage, taste and craft.
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