How To Dress Well At Make Music Pasadena, Saturday June 6th 2015 Review
How To Dress Well
It was my second time seeing the band How to Dress Well, and this time it was a shorter set but in full daylight, and it was even a bit too sunny for frontman Tom Krell. He is certainly an unique guy, apparently always wearing athletic short and approaching his set like a sportive event, or at least this is the impression I had each time.
His operatic R&B howl is quite unique, his vocals remind me at time Michael Jackson’s (think Billie Jean Michael Jackson) or the alto of Pat Grossi from the band Active Child. Krell’s vocals are so eerie, so high falsetto and so emotional and violent at the same time, that he seems to bring all his guts in action. As he did last time, he was balancing his tall body between two mics, bringing echoing reverb accompanied by some ample gesture, while an electronic-synth-pop soundscape was wrapping his stunning vocals.
He was very talkative between songs, may be to recover his breathe, may be to entertain the audience, proving again he is such a loveable guy. You’d want to be his friend immediately, he did even try to become more popular by covering a Taylor Swift song (‘You Are In Love’), but he ‘fucked it up’, partially forgetting some of the lyrics and laughing through it! Just like last time, I thought there was a sort of visceral strength in the middle of his sonic darkness, as well as some real gravitas, mixing emotions and breaking genre barriers as he was dedicating a song to homeless people.
