Inherently speaking, music is something that tends to come from these otherwise untapped recourses inside of our creative minds. While being careful not to suggest that some musicians do not have their crafts down to a science, we can recognize that sometimes a song can surprise in its ability to take on a life of its own. However basic and however elemental the surface may appear, sometimes something isn’t any more complicated than it is a simplistically beautiful piece of music. On the flip side of that spectrum, though, some music can end up being more than just an attempt at outright artistic expression.
How to Dress Well’s “Ocean Floor for Everything,” the first track off of the soon-released Total Loss, delivers on many instances of the aforementioned simplicity and unpretentious nature, yet it’s in this straightforward approach that the listener is transported into an unassuming world, void of all the eclectic layers previous How to Dress Well tracks have featured. There is an uncomfortable shyness to the overall DNA of the song, a happy agony that is grasping at both sides of the spectrum. If nothing else, this duality supplants itself into the listener, forming a sense of heightened reality that maybe this materiel wasn’t necessarily intended for the masses to hear. It’s quiet, if even a bit uncomfortable, but it’s in this usually uncharted territory that something outright charming lies.
Tom Krell, the force behind the HtDW moniker, is slowly building a musical brand that shares this theme with each release. With both pop and R&B influences throughout, it’s ever-apparent that this isn’t your typical “throw stuff at a wall and see what sticks” routine implemented by many a musician these days. It’s contemporary yet it draws on layers heard in The Isely Brotherses and Earth, Wind & Fires of the past. There is a silent method to the madness that allows someone the ability to create something that is as pleasant to the artistic connoisseur as much as the mainstream.
It’s unsettling yet it’s hopeful, and that sort of dynamic isn’t something that is as easily summoned as say, partying with friends, or being “sexy and I know it.” It’s bleak, somewhat cold, and it’s not hard to imagine that whatever Tom Krell is singing about is incredibly personal, if almost to a fault. In its bleakness, then, there lies an undefined theme that may go unrecognized in even the 100th listen. Whether it’s loss, love, a mixture of both, the listener never really lets us in on the secret. At a point, then, we begin to ask ourselves, “does he even know?” But what do some people often say? Sometimes…things are better left unsaid.