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Dry Cleaning’s third album features a lot of strikingly odd lyrics. Take your pick from “alien offshoot mushroom, going the gym to get slim”; “my dream house is a negative space of rock”; or, indeed, “when I was a child I wanted to be a horse, eating onions, carrots, celery”. But it’s an ostensibly more straightforward line, from Cruise Ship Designer, that seems destined to attract the most attention. “I make sure there are hidden messages in my work,” says vocalist Florence Shaw as the track draws to a conclusion, the muscular guitar riff that’s driven it along devolving into a janky, trebly scrabble.
Initially, the lyric appears to characterise what Dry Cleaning do, and Shaw in particular. From the moment they first appeared with the 2018 EP Sweet Princess, the south London quartet have attracted adjectives such as “surreal”, “enigmatic” and “inscrutable”. Most of the British bands who emerged around the same time bearing a roughly equivalent blend of post-punk guitars and spoken-word vocals sounded angry or sarcastic or straightforwardly comedic. Dry Cleaning, on the other hand, seemed mysterious. Shaw’s lyrics were collages of overheard remarks, recycled YouTube comments, lines from adverts and non sequiturs, delivered in a voice that was too icy to sound whimsical. It’s variously been characterised as “anhedonic” and “achromatic”, but might more straightforwardly be described as sounding politely bored. She occasionally shifts from speaking into singing in an untutored voice that brings to mind Stuart Moxham of Young Marble Giants’ line about their understated vocalist Alison Statton sounding “as if she was at the bus stop or something”. It was all intriguingly confusing: here were songs that could indeed contain hidden messages, that seemed like puzzles to be unpicked.
But the line in Cruise Ship Designer is more complicated than a straightforward description of her artistic process. It’s delivered not by Shaw, but via her, as the song’s ghastly protagonist mouths hollow, self-regarding platitudes about his chosen profession: “Designing cruisers is, for me, a privilege and a lesson … it’s a powerful boat for a powerful mind.” In context, it seems to be mocking the idea of larding your work with hidden messages as hopelessly pretentious: and if that’s what you think I’m doing, runs the subtext, you’re dead wrong.
And for all the peculiar imagery (“salt, sugar, vivid dishcloths, lava skylight, mouth of hell”), the songs on Secret Love suggest that Shaw’s real skill as a songwriter may lie in something more prosaic and straightforwardly affecting than setting conundrums for listeners to unravel. When she’s not skewering the pretensions of cruise ship designers – or, rather, using the figure of a cruise ship designer to interrogate the ways people feel driven to justify their more suspect decisions – she’s very good at drawing haunting vignettes of apparently mundane lives that, on closer inspection, are spiralling out of control: the narrator of My Soul/Half Pint, who presents her refusal to clean her house as a bold feminist protest, but is far more troubled than she first appears; the influencer of Evil Evil Idiot, spouting wellness advice that’s not just useless but potentially harmful; the edgelord depicted in Blood, whose cynicism and misanthropy curdles into gory violence.
The lead character in Let Me Grow and You’ll See the Fruit opens the song hymning the pleasures of a solitary day off – “no one coming along with a video call or a survey or a dick pic” – but ends it blurting out their loneliness and alienation: “The world is laughing at me, I am such a disaster.” These are songs that never just feel like someone being clever, although clearly the lyricist behind them is. Nor do they feel weird for weirdness’s sake: they have a genuine gut-level emotional impact.
You could point to the sharpness and empathy of Shaw’s lyrics as one reason why Dry Cleaning stand out amid the vogue for sprechgesang indie. There is also the band’s ability to tie her lyrical flights to concise, pointed, punchy songs, and to their musical expansiveness. If vinegary distorted guitar is still their main thrust on Secret Love, the sound of the album – produced by fellow left-field traveller Cate Le Bon – ventures noticeably beyond that territory, into machine-driven 80s funk on opener Hit My Head All Day; ominous sounding, slow-burn atmospherics on Evil Evil Idiot; I Need You’s synthesised drones. There’s even a hint of warped folk about the guitar figure that drives Secret Love (Concealed in a Drawing of a Boy). It all works, to powerful effect. The sense of a band who have outgrown their original remit, outstripped their initial WTF? novelty value, and are shifting confidently into new spaces, is difficult to miss.
Secret Love is released on 9 January
This week Alexis listened to
Sharp Pins – Popafangout
The Christmas/New Year lull gives you a chance to catch up on stuff you missed, and Sharp Pins’ lo-fi recreation of c 1965 pop is a delight: it’s obviously not doing anything new, but it does what it does beautifully.
