People react differently when faced with conflict; the recent surge of zero-sum politics and cultural backsliding which has become so prominent on both sides of the Atlantic has prompted fear, anger and resignation, desperate states amplified and refracted by those in the arts who have felt as much a minority under direct threat as everyone else.
Tom Krell’s response in the wake of America’s tumultuous 2016 election was to move to Los Angeles, the city a muddledfuckedup waypoint in which he ‘felt himself slipping out of the world and into a cosmic loneliness in which he would eventually be dissolved’.
As the man behind How To Dress Well’s aesthetic, from its early lo-fi beginnings to the sophisticated art-pop of 2016’s Care, this sort of relapse could’ve been a personal and professional disaster, but instead these conditions have produced The Anteroom, a fifth album that takes his fractured wellspring and in turn offers a catharsis of sorts. By any measure, the dislocation it records is a journey, but it’s an elliptical one, sometimes so close as to be claustrophobic, with opener Humans Disguised As Animals an intimate mess of Krell’s distorted vocals and tentative, lost-and-found sequences of dream-like melody, a grip corrupted with deeply experimental R&B.
Even when the listener is given access to the words, perspective is a veil which isn’t much lifted. As illustration, Non-Killing 6 I Hunger is less full of intricate musical trapdoors than much of this highly complex surge, but even its 4/4 structure and upward beats seem roughly juxtaposed with abstract prose like ‘I remember snow, Saw it fall/Watched a child learn, the word ‘nightfall’/And sleep because it’s sad, or not sleep at all/I learned the word forever from Demerol’.
Krell describes the redemptory part of his process as being stationed in ‘a chamber that separates the known and the unknown, stable life from total disintegration’, and these extremes of horror and revelation dominate The Anteroom, from the fractal vulnerability of July 13 No Hope No Pain, Vacant Boat’s skittering, rare sense of connected warmth to Brutal’s gorgeously orchestrated desperation, the latter featuring grainy backwash from poet Ocean Vuong.
Restraint under these circumstances is a circus; there’s no doubting that Krell’s need for extemporising, to make the listener experience the wild swings of living inside the transitory place he’s locked into, makes at times for an almost confrontational experience, a step into a new alienated reality similar, but not the same as, that jump made by Justin Vernon on Bon Iver’s second album 22, A Million.
He is undoubtedly far from the first to re-imagine his pain into sound. But although the idea of structure and scripture is anathema in this agnostic time, The Anteroom’s peak is in the ecstatic madrigal of The Memory, The Spinning Of A Body, a song about life, death or such faith as can be conjured up in anything, a creation as rich as if The Weeknd were to carelessly reconstruct Madonna’s Like A Prayer into a hymn for mass hysteria. It’s a vector which so deeply rewards the listener, where all of Krell’s sometimes ruthless, sometimes tender feelings are exposed like jagged wires, one which makes The Anteroom as necessary as it is difficult and unwilling to fully unravel itself.
It’s also irrefutable proof that Americans can make their country great again in ways hard to fathom until they happen.
