To listen to the music of Dry Cleaning is to be awash in a sea of imagery, like you’ve stepped into a three-dimensional collage that’s constantly in motion, detached bits of phrase floating freely as far as the eye can see. Dry Cleaning is the four-piece project of a group of friends from London, fronted by Florence Shaw, whose vocal delivery sets them apart from just about every other band active in the UK’s “post-punk” these days. More spoken than sung, Shaw’s lyrics imbue the polyrhythms the band generates with a kind of mental fuzziness, specific but incomplete, that makes one feel as if they’re reading a story perpetually in their peripheral vision, or listening to a conversation from across a crowded room, only little bits and pieces breaking through.
The band emerged with a pair of excellent EPs in 2019 but stymied by the pandemic the release of their debut full-length was pushed a quarter of the way into 2021. It’s a singular record, the kind of thing that never fully reveals itself even on a fifth or sixth or tenth listen, but there’s a hypnotic sort of way it draws you into that whirlwind of scattered thought that makes it all the more rewarding to spin it again. The record is called New Long Leg, and it saw them getting signed quickly to venerable UK record label 4AD. But if anything, the band only seemed to relax as more and more spotlights pivoted in their direction; New Long Leg moves at a slightly slower pace, generally, than did either of their previous releases and the distorted guitars of Tom Dowse have mostly been brightened and rounded out, which might be a surprise to someone who started listening chronologically with stuff like ‘Goodnight’ and ‘New Job’.
Dry Cleaning’s Boston-area show takes place in a venue that is itself a mishmash of things, an ornate ballroom bedecked with chandeliers carved into the space above an old movie theatre, a marquee visible in nondescript hallways before giving way to a massive dance floor. It looks like it’d be suitable for a wedding, and as Shaw tells the crowd between songs that there’s some nuptial paraphernalia backstage, including a bunch of flip-flops. The notion of a flimsy shoe as a party favor seems ripe for interpolation in a Dry Cleaning song. “Weddings are good, I guess,” she says. “Anyway. I don’t know. Some are good, some are bad.”
In ‘Strong Feelings’ Shaw characterizes herself as an “emo dead stuff collector” – it’s not entirely clear if “emo” in this case refers to the stuff or to her. But that sense of her task, assembling discarded bits of wordplay into an amalgamation that dares the listener to decipher its Escherian turns, rings undeniably true. “Things come to the brain” she declares immediately after, and then later in the album ‘More Big Birds’ finds that brain “replaced by something”. “I run a tight ship,” Shaw insists, but at the same time its chorus is wordless, barely more than humming, and the drums from Nick Buxton sound like they’re spilling out from somewhere uncontrollably. ‘Traditional Fish’, which is played around the midpoint of the evening, is perhaps the purest form of Dry Cleaning’s style, seemingly inspired by a walk Shaw took down a high street, making note of all the isolated phrases littering signage in and outside of buildings. It all culminates in a series of tabloid headlines – Shaw has, in a remarkably simple fashion, captured the essence of life in a place, as defined by the isolated phrases people have chosen to put in big block letters in their limited space. One has to wonder how many of these signs, these backdrops largely ignored by most, have ever previously had the distinction of making it into song.
Nearly everything about New Long Leg and Dry Cleaning as a whole comes in the form of these little sentence fragments, bits of conversation sans context. “Thanks very much for the Twix.” “Why don’t you want oven chips now?” “Head full of gnomes, zooming through Wales.” Equally interesting, though, are the moments where Shaw’s lyricism flickers into the literal, like in ‘Magic of Meghan’, where she imagines Meghan Markle as a figure in her life, juxtaposing the genuine optimism many held around her marriage to Prince Harry with the absurdity of the press’ granular obsession with her every move.
The last couplet of songs from the main set are ‘Tony Speaks!’ and ‘Scratchcard Lanyard’. The former is a b-side recently released to streaming service; bassist Lewis Maynard rips to the front of the mix more than anywhere else in the band’s discography, a crunchy riff propelling the song forward, calling back a bit to the more unkempt sonics of their debut EP. Dowse alternates between matching with the bassline and conjuring his own strange noises, before the back half of the song becomes a wall of sound. Similarly, ‘Scratchcard’ finds Dowse cutting loose and positively shredding. It’s perhaps the band’s single-best song to date, fast and urgent, with Buxton and Maynard providing an anchor, Dowse injecting some unpredictability in his strikes during each verse, and Shaw straddling the two by the synthesis of her scattershot lyrics and unflappably calm delivery. Of all the lyrics one might extract from any Dry Cleaning song, the imperative here of “do everything and feel nothing” is one of the clearest, the sensation of moving through life at a rapid pace while simultaneously becoming desensitized to the sheer volume of it.
The band returns to the stage for a one-song encore, following cheering from the packed crowd. It’s ‘Conversation’, which seems to alternate between Shaw’s internal monologue, a dinner conversation, and a telephone chat; like a triptych on the awkwardness inherent to interfacing with another. There’s always an undercurrent of humor in the music, like when she says ‘I spent £17 on mushrooms for you, because I’m… silly”, and the brief pause before the final word is itself the punchline in her otherwise-unaltered delivery. Shaw waves to the crowd before departing, demonstrably touched by the room’s enthusiasm. Even with the band’s locked grooves, even with her seemingly-constant tone delivered from the tightest of orbits around her mic stand, these subtle variations lend immense depth to the band’s music, and clearly, it’s resonated with an extensive audience. In a way, it holds a mirror to the listener, a collector’s invitation for them to become an assembler, working that great mass of language into something meaningful, even if that meaning is only fully comprehensible to them. The ultimate ambiguity of it all is distinctly part of the charm.
Review and Photos by Collin Heroux
