Welcome to Sound of the City's year-in-review rock-critic roundtable, an amiable ongoing conversation between five prominent Voice critics: Rob Harvilla, Zach Baron, Sean Fennessey, Maura Johnston, and Rich Juzwiak. We'll be here all week!

James Murphy, pulling no punches.

​Dear fellow illuminati,

My favorite Das Racist line from 2010 remains one they wrote in 2009: "Listening to coke rap, listening to joke rap/Listening to Donuts, listening to grown-ups/Listening to Camu, listening to Cam too." (I have fond memories of watching them perform it earlier this year in Mexico, as a drug war began to break out around us.) But I'm also partial to Sit Down, Man's "We aiight, but media cats think we clever though/Are we?/You may never know." Together, those lines pretty much explain their appeal to rap fans and critics alike--they are us, simultaneously diagramming our passions and, gulp, doing our jobs. Still wrestling with whether there were ten albums released this year that I liked more than their two mixtapes; as discerning rap critics and habitual self-deprecators, I kind of assume they're in the same spot, wondering the same thing.

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​How To Dress Well's Tom Krell sure is peaking at the right time: a new album, Love Remains, out in September on Lefse; a Brooklyn homecoming and HTDW debut at Glasslands this Friday; and, kind of suddenly, a "double A side" 7" single from Transparent Records, on which Krell continues a burgeoning tradition of interpolating other people's songs ("Can't See My Own Face" nods at Beyonce's "Crazy in Love"; "These Visions" riffs on Kanye's "Welcome to Heartbreak") by splicing a bit of MJ's "Baby Be Mine" into new single "Ecstasy of Jojo." The other A side, "Take It On," is more of a muttering, spooky, slow-burner. Together, they're two of the best tracks in Krell's rapidly growing discography--hear them both at Transparent or, presumably, live this Friday:

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​Fitting, somehow, that SOTC old pal and bedroom r&b crooner How To Dress Well would announce his return to New York a day after his idol Kanye West made his triumphant return to America's hearts and minds. Like 'Ye, HTDW's Tom Krell is about to get a lot less mysterious: the Cologne-based falsetto champion will be back on American soil and in the flesh at Glasslands come Friday, August 13th--a fitting date if there ever was one. Congratulate him when you see him on his new LP: Love Remains, HTDW's debut, is out September 21 on Lefse. In the meantime, feel free to listen to any of the seven free EPs currently available at Krell's site. "Suicide Dream 2" still bangs:

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​After quoting liberally from Kanye West's "Welcome to Heartbreak" on their Five Souls EP--then telling us in an interview that they'd like to be adopted by him--How to Dress Well return with "Can't See My Own Face," the "Crazy in Love" (what else?) referencing quasi title track to their newest EP, Can't See My Own Face - The Eternal Love 2. The five songs here (a few of which had already been released) are among the most assertive and straightforwardly longing HTDW have put out in their antic, seven EPs in seven months fall-winter-spring sprint. While Sean's point the other day about indie appropriation vis a vis R&B music is probably fair, so is the fact that Tom Krell can sing, and has the rich aural fantasy life to prove it. This stuff is like a memory. Hear it below:

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The visual accompaniment to the audio we posted last week. Himanshu goes with "Maxwell on Xanax-esque"; Tom Krell, How To Dress Well's sole constant member, says keep the rap and R&B comparisons coming--The-Dream, Kanye, Wayne, he'll take it. Love how much care these dudes take with their entire aesthetic. Can't See My Own Face - The Eternal Love 2, coming soon. [How To Dress Well]

​So the next EP from the Cologne/Brooklyn-based ghost R&B collective How to Dress Well will be called Can't See My Own Face - The Eternal Love 2, a title appropriately halfway between a never-released Lil Wayne/Juelz Santana mixtape and any given The-Dream LP--which pretty much sums up what these guys are about, sans the rapping, anyway.

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​We should've know that How to Dress Well's Tom Krell would be particularly hard hit by Kanye West's brain-meltingly brilliant blog post yesterday on the subject of creativity and the pyramids of Egypt, since when we interviewed him Krell more or less begged the Internet to get word to Kanye that he was looking to be adopted. (Us too!) But there was more to the How to Dress Well post that went up yesterday calling Kanye one of our "great geniuses" and empathizing re the whole "NIGHT DEMONS" thing. To wit: a hidden track! In the ellipses that follow "new how to dress well soon...," there is in fact a link, and in that link a song. A jam actually. "Mr By & By":

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​How to Dress Well is the nom de R&B of one Tom Krell, a Cologne/Brooklyn-based bedroom producer whose weird, ethereal, indie-soul EPs have been rolling out all winter at the rate of about one per month. The alias has been around for nearly six years, and Krell has been making music for far longer, but it wasn't until the singer moved from Brooklyn to Germany and joined up with the equally mysterious cokc dokc--about which more in a second--that How to Dress Well really came into its own as a blurry, Kanye-covering, falsetto-cranking basement R&B outfit. Start with Five Souls, one of two EPs HTDW and cokc dokc have released this month: it's got everything from macho echoing house tracks to a take on West's "Welcome to Heartbreak" to sleepy slow jams that entirely HTDW's own. We recently caught up with Krell over the phone to discuss rap radio in Denver, gay sex acts, and why his band's not called How to Photograph Women Beautifully.

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First of all, no idea, really--busted-headphone indie-rocker R&B with Kanye West covers and lots of falsetto from the Friendship Bracelet family. They've dropped six EPs since September, the last two of which--Born Bodies and Five Souls--came out today. Some (one? named Tom Krell?) of How to Dress Well are from Brooklyn; the rest (other?) are from Cologne, in Germany. They are doing things not unlike what Salem does to rap, except where with Salem it's most in the production, with HTDW it's mostly in the vocals, which are high and expressive and alternately chilling and sort of romantic. "These Visions," a collaboration with the similarly mysterious cokc dokc (as is all of Five Souls), is a riff on Ye's "Welcome to Heartbreak":

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