Eternal transparency or general misery

0:00You're listening to a podcast right now, driving, working out, walking the dog. If you're in a podcast, chances are you have something to say too. With RSS.com, starting your own podcast is free and easy. Upload an episode and we distribute it to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music and more. Track your listeners, see where they're from, and start earning from ads just like this. If you've been thinking about starting a podcast, this is your sign. Or your new podcast for free today at RSS.com. Imagine releasing the most successful, highest charting project of your entire career. You pour your absolute soul into it, you send it out into the world and half the people who review it, basically call it a soundtrack to general misery. Oh, wow. Yeah, that is rough. It really is. That is the exact paradox we are stepping into today. We are not just looking at a standard album release. You're looking at an artist who basically handed the music press a mirror and just watch the reflection completely shatter.

1:01Yeah, I mean, it's the hallmark of truly dangerous art, you know, when you create something that refuses to be just background noise, you force a reaction. Exactly. And sometimes that reaction is aw, and sometimes it's just absolute flat out rejection. Welcome to today's Deep Dive, everyone. We are immersing ourselves in the source material today, which is a Wikipedia article detailing a deeply fascinating moment in music history. It's the 2014 album, What Is This Heart? By the Musical Act, How to Dress Well. Yeah. And for those who don't know, this is the third studio album from the American musician, Tom Crill, recording under that moniker. Right. And it was released on June 23, 2014 via Weird World, which is an imprint of the Domino recording label, yeah? Exactly. So we have an established artist, a major indie label, and this piece of art that somehow managed to peak at number 145 on the Billboard 200, which is huge. It's huge. But while doing that, it simultaneously created an absolute fault line in music criticism.

2:02It really did. The divergence in the critical reception is staggering. You have like respected publications calling it this work of eternal transparency. Right. And then others treat it like it's some sort of endurance test of emotional torment. And you know, that kind of split doesn't happen by accident. Okay, let's unpack this because before we can even talk about the music itself or, you know, the wild reactions it provoked, we have to look at how this artist introduces the project before you even hit play. Oh, the title. Yes, we have to talk about the typography of the album's title because it is so incredibly deliberate. In the source material, there's a tweet from Crill himself explaining exactly how the title is supposed to be stylized. Right. Yeah. He wrote, quote, my new album is called, what is this heart? It's like that in quotes like a spoken question. What's fascinating here is the demand for emotional labor that's just embedded in that punctuation. Oh, interesting. How so? Well, by putting the title in quotation marks, Crill is not giving you a label. He is documenting an out loud utterance.

3:03Wow. Yeah. He's framing the entire, you know, 55 minute album as a real time crisis. It's like, um, it's like walking into a crowded networking event. And instead of wearing a standard name tag that says, you know, hi, I'm Tom. You wear a name tag that says, am I a good person? Yes. Exactly. You aren't giving the other person a neat category to place you in. You are forcing the person looking at you to actively engage with your internal monologue. I mean, it is a startling inquiry. I would actually take that analogy a step further, honestly, because it isn't just startling, right? It's an invitation to participate in this confusion. A question like, what is this heart inherently implies that the speaker does not have the answer. Right. He's asking us exactly. It completely strips away the traditional armor of the pop star, like the pop stars supposed to have it all figured out, you know, they delivered the polished anthem. Yeah. The catchy hook. But Crill is saying, I am overwhelmed. I don't know what this feeling is.

4:04And by pressing play on this album, you are agreeing to help me figure it out. But you know, you don't just ask a profound question like that in a vacuum. Oh, definitely not. You have to score it. You have to build a sonic environment that actually matches the weight of that punctuation. Right. And looking at the genres associated with this album, the article, the musical landscape is incredibly chaotic. The text categorizes this project as alternative R&B, experimental, ambient, lo-fi, and experimental pop. It's just a massive collision of sonic philosophies. You have genres that fundamentally serve entirely different purposes, all fighting for space on the exact same track. And this is where I really have to push back a little, or at least, you know, admit my own confusion here. Okay. Go for it. How can a piece of music simultaneously be pop? Which to me implies mass appeal, highly engineered, catchy vocal hooks designed to get stuck in your head. Right. The earworm. How can it be that and ambient or lo-fi at the same time?

5:06Because ambient music is specifically designed to be atmospheric, right, to blend into the background. Yeah. Brian Eno style, exactly. Right. And lo-fi implies a gritty, unpollished, almost amateurish sound quality. Aren't those concepts mutually exclusive? I mean, you cannot be trying to grab my attention with a pop hook and actively trying to blend into the background at the exact same time. Well, mechanically, they are mutually exclusive, which is exactly why blending them creates such visceral discomfort for a listener. Oh, so it's intentional discomfort? Precisely. The producers on this album, Rodade McDonald, along with the electronic artist, CFCF. Oh, right. They co-wrote and co-produced the tracks a power and what you wanted. Yes. Exactly. They use acoustic friction as an actual psychological tool. How do they do that? They achieve this by taking a pristine, catchy, pop vocal like the kind of melody your brain immediately recognizes and wants to latch on to, and then they bury it under layers of distorted synthesizer and heavy reverb. So they're intentionally obscuring the most accessible part of the song?

6:10Precisely. Your brain recognizes the pot structure. It really wants the dopamine hit of that clean, repetitive hook. Yeah. But the ambient fuzz and the lo-fi grit obscure it. It physically forces you, the listener, to strain your ears to hear the emotion. Wow. It's an acoustic manipulation that mimics the actual real world effort it takes to understand someone who's emotionally overwhelmed. Yeah. It's just someone having trouble articulating their feelings. Oh, wow. So the soundways themselves are mimicking the feeling of an emotional breakdown. Yeah, exactly. It isn't just a stylistic choice to, like, sound cool or edgy. It is a physical manifestation of the album's title. The break isn't just one sharp, easily identifiable pain, like a clean pop vocal. It's also this dull, lingering, confusing fog, like an ambient drone. And Crel is essentially forcing you to sit in that fog. He's using artists like CFCF who are really known for building highly immersive, layered electronic worlds to construct a landscape where clarity is just constantly denied.

7:12That tension, that feeling of your brain being pulled in two different directions by the production, it isn't just in the sound either. He actually maps that out for us structurally in the track list. Yes. And track list is fascinating. The album runs exactly 55 minutes and one second, and it's spread across 12 tracks. And these track titles, they read, like, deeply conflicted poetry. They really do. We have track one, two years on, and then in parentheses, shame dream. We have track nine, childhood faith and love, parenthetical, everything must change, everything must stay the same. Right. Track 12, house inside, parenthetical, future is older than the past. The heavy reliance on parentheticals just jumps right off the screen. I mean, it is a very specific, highly unusual way to form out a track list. Here's where it gets really interesting. Almost every major emotional pivot on this album utilizes those brackets in the title. Yeah. To me, it feels like this is Crel's way of holding two completely conflicting thoughts at exactly the same time. Oh, absolutely. The main title is the conscious mind trying to establish a fact.

8:15And the parenthetical is the subconscious mind whispering this terrifying contradiction right next to it. Right. Right. Take track nine, you know, childhood faith and love, and then the brackets, everything must change, everything must stay the same. If we connect this to the bigger picture, analyzing a title like future is older than the past, really reveals a profound internal struggle with how human beings process time and trauma. Yeah. Tell me more about that. I think of the past as old and the future is new and unwritten, right? Standard linear time. But when someone is grappling with deep emotional baggage, the psychology flips. The events of the past feel incredibly present and heavy. Oh, wow. While the concept of a future feels exhausted, tired, and somehow already weighed down by history. That's incredible. Yeah, the track list is literally charting a roadmap of a mind that is divided against itself, which brings us to a really critical juncture in this deep dive. Because when you build a monument to your own internal division like this, when you broadcast this intense vulnerability through your title, your genre bending sound, and your deeply

9:20psychological track list, and then you put it out on a major indie label for mass consumption. You surrender all control over how people interpret it. Exactly. The moment the art leaves the studio, it belongs to the audience. And the audience for this album was severely fractured. That is an understatement. Right. It pulls an aggregate metacritic score of 69 out of 100 based on 32 critics. Now Metacritics technically defines that range as indicating generally favorable reviews. Sure. Technically. But an audience of our caliber knows that an aggregate score of 69 rarely means everyone just thought the album was fine. No, not at all. Usually a score hovering right below the 70s signifies a piece of media that is either deeply flawed or dangerously innovative. It means you have a wild spread of polarized opinions. Yeah, a 69 in cultural criticism is almost always the hallmark of a cult classic. Oh, definitely. It means the artist took a swing so massive that it fundamentally alienated a significant portion of the room.

10:20Look at the extremes we have in the source material. NME gave it a middling 5 out of 10. The AV club initially slapped it with a C++ verge. And the Guardian published a review that is almost legendary in its bluntness, literally calling the album a soundtrack to heartbreak in general misery. General misery. I mean, that's brutal. But then you look at the other side of the aisle, spin rate at it, a 7 out of 10, stating the artist, quote, opens a vein, bleeds turbulent R&B. Even the AV club in the text of their review noted that how to dress well remains torn between pop-escapism and emotional torment. General misery versus turbulent R&B. I mean, we were talking about vastly different sensory experiences of the exact same 55 minutes of audio. It's wild. And I want to turn this over to you, listening right now. Have you ever poured your heart out to someone? Maybe you sat down with a friend or a partner and you completely laid yourself bare. It's terrifying.

11:21It is. You share your deepest, most confusing insecurities only to realize that the person sitting across from you fundamentally misunderstood what you were trying to say. Yeah. Or they tried to offer a quick fix when all you really wanted was for them to just, you know, sit in the fog with you. The isolation that stems from being vulnerable and then being misunderstood is profound. It really makes you want to retreat and never share again. And that is exactly what this critical reception feels like on a macro scale. It seems like some of these music critics walked into this album wanting pure pop-escapism. They wanted a distraction from their day. Right. Krell handed them complex emotional torment instead. They rejected the mirror he was holding up and simply labeled it misery. Art criticism is inherently subjective, obviously. But an album, this nakedly emotional, acts as a psychological litmus test for the listener. Oh, a litmus test, I like that. Yeah. For critic listens to what is this heart and immediately dismisses it as miserable.

12:23It often speaks to their own discomfort with unprocessed sadness. Oh, yeah. They are repelled by the reflection. The critics who praise the turbulence, however, are the ones who possess the emotional bandwidth to embrace the discomfort. Right. They weren't looking for a catchy distraction, you know. They were looking for resonance. But the beauty of putting something that vulnerable out into the world is that while you will inevitably alienate some people, you create a beacon for the people who actually speak your language. Really? And there is one review in our source material that stands out because it seems to catch Krell's reflection perfectly. Oh, Ian Cohen's piece for Pitchfork. Yes. It is an absolute masterclass in understanding the artist's intent. Yeah. Cohen wrote the review for Pitchfork, giving the album a glowing 8.8 out of 10. And his analysis just cuts straight to the bone of why this album matters. It really does. He writes that modern discourse like the way we communicate as a society today seeks metaphorical blood, allowing people to disclose more than ever without actually revealing

13:27anything. Let's just sit with that for a second. Disclose more than ever without actually revealing anything. It's so good. That single sentence perfectly diagnoses the modern social condition. It really does. I mean, think about how we operate on social media today. Cool. For sure. We post dozens of photos of our vacations, our meals, the concerts we go to, we update our statuses, we share our locations. We are constantly disclosing an incredible, unprecedented amount of data about the logistics of our lives. Right. The logistics. We are offering up the metaphorical blood that the algorithms demand. But we can do all of that. We can be perceived by thousands of people every single day without ever actually revealing how we truly feel. Yeah. We give the illusion of intimacy without any of the actual stakes. And this raises an important question about the difference between performance and reality. Exactly. What is distinguishing between the performance of vulnerability and actual, risky, unvarnished honesty? Right. Because society loves the performance.

14:28Yeah. We love reality TV arguments. We love carefully curated crying selfies. Those things are safe because they are controlled. Right. They're bounded. But true honesty. The kind that asks some messy question and refuses to provide a need answer is jarring. It demands something of the viewer. Owen concludes his review by stating that Creel operates with eternal transparency. He writes, quote, Creel asks, what is this heart? And lets you look right into his own. Wow. He frames this entire 55 minute album, not as an exercise in misery, but as a radical act of defiance against shallow disclosure. And undertaking that defiance requires immense courage, honestly, to walk into a recording booth, knowing that your work might be graded a C plus by someone who simply doesn't want to engage with it, or dismissed as a 5 out of 10 by someone looking for a dance track. To know all of that and still choose to bury your pub hooks in ambient noise and bracket your track titles with contradictory subconscious thoughts, you do it because that eternal

15:30transparency is the only authentic way you know how to communicate. And it frames that billboard 200 peak at number 145 in an entirely new light. It isn't just a chart statistic anymore. It's a quiet, profound victory. It proves that there was an audience out there navigating the complexities of 2014 who recognized the hollowness of constant disclosure and desperately needed someone to ask that spoken question alongside them. It demonstrates that while absolute transparency might fracture your audience, it fundamentally bonds you to the people who are willing to look into the mirror with you. The people who stay are the ones who matter. We have covered a massive amount of ground today. We really have. We started with a cryptic, deliberately punctuated tweet. We navigated through the mechanical friction of blending ambience and pop genres. Right, the sonic fog. Exactly. We dissected the psychology of parenthetical track titles and waited right through the middle of an incredibly polarizing critical divide. A complete journey from the typography of a title to the psychology of modern communication.

16:35So what does this all mean? If we strip away the billboard charts, the indie labels and the metacritic scores, the core lesson we pull from today's sources is that true honest expression is always a monumental risk. Absolutely always. Just as that 69 out of 100 aggregate score illustrates, putting your truest, most complicated self out into the world will almost never result in universal praise. No, it won't. Some people will look at your vulnerability, recoil, and label it misery. And others, the ones paying close attention, will recognize it as a masterpiece of eternal transparency. You cannot manage the reception of your truth. You can only maintain the integrity of the utterance. Which brings us back to the idea of the neatly wrapped package we often present to the world. It is so much easier to hand people a polished, easily digestible version of yourself. It is. But I want to leave you with a final thought to mull over as you go about the rest of your day or the next time you open an app on your phone in a world that constantly demands

17:35our metaphorical blood, where we are heavily pressured to continuously share, post, and update our lives without ever really saying anything of substance. What would it actually look like for you to practice eternal transparency in your own life today? Are you simply disclosing data or are you actually revealing yourself? Thank you so much for joining us on this deep dive. Stay curious, keep asking the difficult questions and we will catch you next time. You're listening to a podcast right now, driving, working out, walking the dog. If you're into podcasts, chances are you have something to say too. With RSS.com, starting your own is free and easy. Upload an episode and we distribute it to Apple podcasts, Spotify, Amazon music, and hundreds more. Track your listeners, see where they're from, and start earning from ads like this. Even with just 10 listeners a month. If you've been thinking about starting a podcast, this is your sign. Start free at RSS.com.