The term “post-punk” is much overused to describe music, not least by we music writers. It usually covers anything with punk’s outsider attitude but boasting an arty, tricky musical ambition beyond 1977’s spit’n’roar. Not all music described thus sounds as if it might have bothered the indie charts between 1978 and 1984, but Dry Cleaning do. Their third album’s bubbling combination of musical scratchiness and impassively delivered spoken word is pure post-punk. It’s also an intriguing and likeable listen.
The rhythm throughout is a groovy plod, guitars wilfully relishing atonal skronk, coming on like a slow-funky, benzodiazepine-laced fusion of Squid, Bodega and The Fall. What defines their sound, though, is the chatted lyrics and singing of frontwoman Florence Shaw. Her low-spoken abstract vignettes and dryly comedic, poetic flights of fancy are the key ingredient. But, on Secret Love, produced by Welsh singer Cate le Bon, extra uplift is provided by Shaw’s lazily sweet singing interludes.
Songs such as “Blood” and “I Need You” have a light, opiated euphoria, their music lifted by twinkling, spaced-out motes of melody that sound synthesised but may be from guitar pedals. Such songs have a welcome hypnagogic quality. Elsewhere the music ranges from straightforward lo-fi indie, such as “Joy”, to the album’s opening highlight, the six-minute, space-funked “Hit My Head All Day”.
Shaw’s lyrics are appealingly opaque, unforced but eccentric, whether unknowable in intent, or juicily offbeat in their specificity, as on “Evil Evil Idiot” (“I could never live with someone who doesn’t enjoy scorched and burnt food as much as me”). Some are just straightforwardly, satirically funny, as with “Cruise Ship Designer”: “Cruises are big business/I don't personally like them/But I need to serve a useful purpose/I desire very much a place in society/So designing cruise ships is my pastime”.
Likeable (but, for this writer, not necessarily more-ish), Dry Cleaning’s laidback, witty, offbeat music deserves its place in the contemporary spotlight.
Below: Watch Dry Cleaning play album highlight "Hit My Head All Day" live
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