by Sam Jennings (@Walt_Whitmensch)
Dry Cleaning is singer Florence Shaw, guitarist Tom Dowse, bassist Lewis Maynard, and drummer Nick Buxton. Their debut album, New Long Leg (out now via 4AD), is—given its specifically-chosen milieu—a near-perfect album. It cleanly situates them as the next in a long-storied line of great post-punk bands and is a testament to the ongoing musical tradition of surrealistically-inclined arty Brits driven to cool affect and alienation by Modern Society; (I’m not complaining but) apparently this shit just doesn’t age.
Ever since Wire first chugged and skronked their way through a thick—No scratch that: has there been a time since, hell, I don’t know, Dickens? that the British Arts haven’t been especially overwhelmed by the legacy of the industrialization they cruelly perfected? I’m really not here to do sociological analysis on such things as imperial guilt, or rotting Tory repression.
Still, there’s feckless Royals on the prowl again in the international scene, and for those of us terrified of the press, here comes Dry Cleaning to redeem us with a tram-rhythmed, chugging, pulsing, effortless groove-that-just-don’t-won’t-stop (somewhere indebted to Gang of Four, though also Neu, Sonic Youth). Above all there’s Florence Shaw, whose cool, low Sprechstimme makes it all work, neatly sidestepping any bald attempt to “say” anything obvious about the world.
Of course, it’s impossible to listen to Shaw without thinking of the divine Sue Thompkins and Life Without Buildings. Makes one wonder why more people haven’t exploited that very specific channel opened up by Thompkins’ limber wordplay. Shaw steps into this lane nicely but avoids any really overwhelming debt with her own sheer dexterous point of view: as opposed to Thompkins’ giddy Dadaism, Shaw is a deadpan Jeanne Moreau—she looms coolly above it all. As her bandmates thrash mightily around her, she may as well have a cigarette in hand to decorate all those wonderfully blasé-surreal pronouncements she contains.
To the degree that what she does is difficult to describe is the degree to which she has succeeded: her words are not so much spoken poems as they are the catalogue of a sensibility. That sensibility is big—really big—and funny. Her lyrics can be, in any given moment: a tourist manifesto, a series of stray thoughts, a list of things that seem out of place, exhortations to pat Dad, museum guides for the poor of eyesight, and dozens of memorable images and characters: an emo dead stuff collector, a fat podgy, an unsmart lady, an electrician sticking his finger in the plughole and shouting "Yaba!," a woman in aviators firing a bazooka.
It’s a literary romp and, really, anyone who has the temerity to say “mystical Shakespeare shoes” and mean it should have lyricists everywhere bowing to the freedom her sensibility affords her. Florence Shaw is a remarkable persona and her band as solid as Roman concrete. Every one of these ten songs rocks, fucks, splinters in the mind’s eye, coruscates neatly. It’s a whiz—don’t trust me, enjoy!