How To Dress Well at The Waiting Room

Knees are kind of a strange body part anyway – a junction of ligaments, bones and muscles, with the aesthetic potential for sexy, repulsive, intimate or awkward.

But exposed onstage, knees are doubly striking, especially long, knobby joints following three inches of pale thigh under black Nike gym shorts. Top with a baggy Nike Air T-Shirt, which looks even more baggy on a skinny 6’3” frame, and you have How to Dress Well’s frontman Tom Krell in a hot-cold blend of casual and vulnerable at the Waiting Room Tuesday night.

The rolled-out-of-bed-to-play-pickup-basketball look could be interpreted as a jab at the band’s own stage name, but it’s still not the expected visual complementing How to Dress Well, a smooth Brooklyn-based R&B production led and produced by Krell. (Omaha electronic duo Routine Escorts opened the show.)

Krell notoriously samples pop influences — from Lou Reed, to Young Thug to Starting Line — and creates ethereal slow jams by layering them over abstract noise and his own angelic falsetto.

The results are dreamy, and the lyrics are tragic, nihilistic questions of love and loss written as only Krell, a Ph.D. student in philosophy at DePaul University in Chicago., can.

Tracks from the band’s most recent album “What Is This Heart?” which made up the majority of Tuesday’s 10-song setlist, are clearer and more upbeat than the fuzz of the band’s previous albums, Love Remains (2010) and Total Loss (2012).

And they are clearer and more upbeat still when accompanied by Krell’s onstage enthusiasm. He’d glance at his band — the drum set to his right and double keyboards to his left — waiting for the drop and reverberations, grinning exuberantly at the sounds.

How to Dress Well made music Tuesday night, quite well, but not in the sense of an orchestrated performance. The backdrop was a white sheet haphazardly draped for synchronized splashes of light, like a hazy iTunes visualizer, with a single spotlight layering Krell’s silhouette backstage. Krell announced each song before it began, despite how the genre lends itself to long, layered sets, and peppered the evening with leisurely banter about the band’s astrology signs.

He did, in fact, play basketball Tuesday morning, in Benson’s Grace Young Park, he told us, to rally from the hangover he earned during three consecutive power hours on the tour bus from Boulder, Colo. to Omaha.

But his outfit wasn’t his basketball clothes, he answered to an audience member shouting follow-up questions.

“This is from Pigalle. I got this in fucking Paris, bro,” Krell said, grabbing a fistful of his T-Shirt.

The crowd laughed because he was spontaneous and charming, but not because they were sure whether he was joking or not.

But two seconds later Krell launched into “Set It Right,” and no one laughed or smiled.

He knit his eyebrows, and when he wasn’t leaning on his microphone stands like twin crunches, punctuated beats by stabbing long arms into the air. During some songs, like “Words I Don’t Remember,” Krell added dozens of breathy, Michael-Jackson-esque uh’s, like you do, singing your heart out, alone in your basement.

It might be the juxtaposition of performance and audience interaction that made each seem meaningful.

“An ancient Greek tragedian said that tragedy in excess falls flat,” Krell told Pitchfork earlier this year.

So Krell casually mentioned that “Suicide Dream 1” was written for a friend who died, which impacted the entire trajectory of his sophomore album, threw in a joke about performing angry stand-up comedy, then plunged the audience into an airy soul-ripping three minutes.

There was a moment at the end of the song, where Krell, warbling in inhuman falsetto, writhed his open hand under his shirt for a moment.

It was hard to tell: He could have been casually scratching an itch on his bare chest, or he could have been feeling his heart.