This third LP by the London experimental post-punk quartet with the distinctive, spoken, droll delivery of Florence Shaw, is packed with striking, vivid, often non seqitur lyrics capturing life’s surreal mundanities and neuroses with a sound coloured and polished by Cate Le Bon as producer. There’s also a distinctive echo of Le Bon’s and the band’s love of Bowie in opener Hit My Head All Day, harking back to the 1980s Scary Monsters-er in guitar sound. Sometimes Dry Cleaning appear to be two separate entities in play – Shaw’s drily humorous, dark poetic musings layered in strange juxtaposition over the otherworld of angular, jangling post-punk by the clever musicianship of Lewis Maynard, Nick Buxton and Tom Dowse. But here there’s a more integration, particularly with that opener, and a quieter, more stripped back sound that complements those oddities of lyrics (“when I was a child I wanted to be a horse, eating onions, carrots, celery”). Offbeat, spoken word performance has been a trend of the last few years, with excellent independent parallel acts such as The Cool Greenhouse, but Shaw and co have been lucky and well as deserving of having broken into the bigger market since their breakthrough track of 2020 - Scratchcard Lanyard.
As a live experience they are less rewarding listen than the intimacy of headphones and intimate nuance of Shaw’s lyrics and delivery, which captures a mix of stream of consciousness, overheard conversations, advertising cliches, social media comments and seemingly throwaway phrasing with a refreshing hue and potency. Cruise Ship Designer takes on the voice of this profession, a man who “believes in design” and while “cruises are big business I don't personally like them /But I need to serve a useful purpose”. There’s a telling banality here.
Other striking lines include “Alien offshoot mushroom / Going the gym to get slim / Because he taught me to be a winner” (The Cute Things); the depressed, obsessive female protagonist of My Soul/Half Pint: “I like to sort, move my things around, colour coding / Everything has a home in my house / But I don't like to clean, I find cleaning demeaning / But that's kind of a problem of mine / I'm a woman and I think if I clean then I feel resentment in my soul”; the pleasures of being left in solitary peace in Let Me Grow and You’ll See the Fruit where “no one coming along with a video call or a survey or a dick pic” yet “the world is laughing at me, I am such a disaster”; or the menacing influencer who narrates Evil Evil Idiot who has an undercurrent of boiling violent rage: “I don't want to be lectured / I like to burn my food up / Flames baptise the filth of plastic surfaces that has migrated onto my precious natural ingredients.” With other telling track such as Blood or Joy, this is not merely a drolly amusing, clever piece of experimental lyricism and sound, but one that captures the strange, dark isolation of society through its inner thoughts through the prism of an increasingly disquieting, if home comforts-based world, wherein each track is also accompanied by surreal videos of characters dancing eccentrically on their own. Powerfully odd. Out on 4AD.
New to comment? It is quick and easy. You just need to login to Disqus once. All is explained in About/FAQs ...
Feel free to recommend more new songs and albums and comment below. You can also use the contact page, or find more on social media: Song Bar X, Song Bar Facebook. Song Bar YouTube, and Song Bar Instagram. Please subscribe, follow and share.
Song Bar is non-profit and is simply about sharing great music. We don’t do clickbait or advertisements. Please make any donation to help keep the Bar running: