Total Loss
- How to Dress Well
- Band Name: How to Dress Well
- Record Label: Acephale
- Release Date: Oct 2, 2012
- Critic Score
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Sep 18, 201270How to Dress Well still works best when Krell favors the more ethereal side of his music, blurring together his influences into something more unique.
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Sep 20, 201284Total Loss uses the common tools of pop expression-- four-minute songs, autobiography, choruses, confession-- to create a work of poignant and devastating art.
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Sep 18, 201260Melancholic, romantic and unashamedly emotional, his loss is our gain. [Oct 2012, p.103]
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Sep 28, 201280An intriguing new artist has found his voice. [Nov 2012, p.76]
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Sep 25, 201270Total Loss is a beautiful album, all ambient longing and sadness and spectral pop, rising and falling without warning - no other artist gets more emotional effect out of leaving things not quite finished. But it still feels not quite finished.
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Sep 18, 201280Squired by The xx producer Rodaidh McDonald, this second album is hugely accomplished.
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Sep 18, 201270When Krell is on, he's on. [Aug/Sep 2012, p.111]
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Sep 18, 201280There's a delicacy, a deftness of touch throughout Total Loss that's wondrous.
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Sep 18, 201270While Love Remains proved a hard listen because of its liberal use of distorted effects, Total Loss is tough going because of the emotional intensity of its content.
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Sep 20, 201280Total Loss is surely one of the year's most affecting records: a symphony of pain that continues haunting long after the record ends.
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Sep 18, 201260This new approach is graceful but weary, with mixed results throughout.
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Sep 18, 201250Krell seems like a victim of his own good intentions. There's a kernel of an idea here.
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Sep 18, 201280By focusing both on overt dynamics and dozens of quiet, underlying ripples, Krell has lent his work a subtle weightiness that becomes clear only after repeat listens.
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Sep 18, 201280On the poignant and powerful Total Loss, he's finally invited us all in.
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Sep 18, 201260His improved state of mind, and the superior production on some of the tracks, does bring the music on occasion perilously close to the RnB blandness to which this is presumably supposed to provide an alternative.
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Sep 21, 201266Although Total Loss focuses on the deterioration of relationships over time, it's interesting that each track inverts that idea by flourishing with every second that passes.
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Sep 18, 201280It's a less unified effort than its predecessor because of this, but more importantly, Krell treads new grounds.
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Dec 7, 201280With eleven songs, the album flows serenely well and sounds like a two part voyage; the second half much weightier, the first half perhaps more buoyant.
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Sep 18, 201275whereas Krell's keening, pleading falsetto dominated Love Remains, Total Loss finds him granting the rest of his sonic palette more prominence.
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Sep 24, 201285It's an album that ceaselessly overflows with love and a desire to reach out and relate, and it's this that makes such a heavy album so accessible and so resoundingly good.
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Sep 18, 201280HWTD has dug himself a neat, little songbird alcove and it's one only he can reach.
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Sep 19, 201280Total Loss is a brave effort by an artist who's clearly not afraid to show vulnerability through risk-taking and soul baring.
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Sep 18, 201270Amongst all that haze, it's clear that Krell has produced another gorgeous record that is incredibly open about love and loss.
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Sep 18, 201280Total Loss is an overwhelming album given the rollercoaster of emotions Krell goes through over the course of its 11 tracks.
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Sep 18, 201280Total Loss is a largely dud-free album.