#676: D is for Dry Cleaning

I

In the short storied tradition of spoken word poets
who front rock bands, stands Florence Shaw,
the lead singer, or speaker, the raconteuse
for post-punk English rock band Dry Cleaning.
She does not sing, although she can carry
a tune, as evidenced by the occasional
humming or melodic lyric line. Mostly,
she talks, recites, speaks her poems
while a rock band plays an arrangement
of parts A, B, and C underneath, sometimes
quietly, other times abrasively. The drummer
and bass player set up a groove and the
guitar player riffs, improvises, or solos
over the top, the whole time while Florence
is busting out bars in the most unaffected
deadpan you will ever hear. There is
practically no inflection in her low-talk
recitations; she could be reading the
text of a recipe, or entries in an instruction
manual, and yet, listeners find themselves,
as I have found myself, three albums in,
captivated and mesmerized. I mean,
I think, in order to appreciate this band
and grow to dismiss them, like them,
or love them, you must listen to the words.
And that’s not easy, because often she is
somewhat buried in the mix, under the
drums and the guitar and bass. Not
buried, really, because she can be heard,
but if you want to know what she’s saying,
you have to listen closely and/or you have
to read along with the lyric sheet;
you can’t be doing dishes in the other room.
I mean, if you choose to do that, you might
still get some pleasure from listening to
the tight, groove-oriented ensemble work
of the band, but ultimately you’d be missing
the main attraction. Tonight, with a terrible
cold, I’m listening backwards, to the new
album first, Secret Love, on headphones.
In the first four songs Florence has
done more actual singing than she did
on the first two albums combined, it seems,
singing and talking about hitting her head,
about being a cruise ship designer,
about her disdain for cleanliness, about
a “secret love concealed in the drawing
of a boy.” Musically, this album is way
more chill than the ones that came
before, less abrasive, less rocking,
the musicians are making more space
inside of which Florence can do her thing,
with a couple noisy exceptions on side two.
I hesitated to grab this third album from
Dry Cleaning because I predicted it might
not diverge enough from the first two,
but on this third listen since I picked it
up last week, I’m happy I went back for
a third helping. Produced by Cate Le Bon,
it’s a more spacious record, more melodic,
and more nuanced musically than the first
two. I can picture Cate Le Bon, an outstanding
experimental musician in her own right,
urging Florence to sing, even maybe against
her better judgment, with terrific results.

II

Stumpwork goes down as having perhaps
the most unlikely cover art in recent memory.
It’s a soggy bar of soap with the title of the album,
Stumpwork, spelled out in what appears to be
tiny little hairs. I’m sure it was shopped. I can’t
imagine the artist sculpting those letters by hand
on a soggy bar of soap. And where would she
get the hair? But you never know.
I discover in a quick google search that
stumpwork is a style of embroidery from
the 17th century that creates a kind of
three-dimensional effect using padding,
wire, and needlelace to make the design
pop out from its fabric, and here’s
a super power that Florence Shaw has as
a vocalist: The song “Anna Calls From The Arctic”
consists of one bass riff over and over again,
decorated in various ways with drums and guitar,
but it does not get boring, even though it’s near
impossible to say what Anna is calling about.
“Gary Ashby,” a song about a missing turtle
is maybe the first song in the band’s oeuvre to
feature actual singing, and the band sounds like
the Smiths, or this guitar sounds like Johnny Marr.
In fact, on a lot of this stuff, the band sounds like
the Smiths. I think Cate Le Bon, producing the
new album, said to them, you can’t sound like
The Smiths. Cut it out. And they did.

III

“Scratchcard Lanyard” was the first Dry Cleaning
song I ever heard. “I’ve come to join a knitting circle”
is not a lyric line you expect to hear in a rock song,
or a list of various kinds of bouncy balls and their
geographic origins, concluding with the nihilistic
exhortation: “do everything and feel nothing.”
There’s no singing anywhere on this song, just
the speaking, but regardless, the knitting, the
bouncy balls, and “I think of myself as a hardy
banana,” become hook lines impossible to forget.
Later on in the song “Strong Feelings,” Shaw says,
again, deadpan, dead serious, “I’ve been thinking
about eating that hot dog for hours,” and ” I just
want to tell you I’ve got scabs on my head,”
all ruminations, I gather, of “just an emo dead
stuff collector.” Listening to all three records,
like I’ve done, back to back, and from newest
to oldest, I see the key evolution of the band
has been to diversify the sonic palate, tone down
the bass guitar a couple of notches, incorporate
some electronics, encourage Florence to sing.
What remains consistent is the absurdist,
digressive, free-associative, and spoken word
style of Florence Shaw’s performances, and
the vibe that is created as a backdrop for her
wild musings by her three musical compatriots,
a groovy, skilled, distinctive ensemble.

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Notes on the vinyl editions:

• Secret Love, 4AD Records, 2026, pumpkin vinyl.
• Stumpwork, 4AD Records, 2022, white vinyl.
• New Long Leg, 4AD Records, 2021, black vinyl.

In case you don’t already know: I’m listening to almost everything in my vinyl collection, A to Z, and writing a long skinny poem-like-thing in response for each artist, and on a few occasions, writing a long skinny poem-like-thing in response to more than one artist. As a poet and a student of poetry, I understand that these things look like poems, but they don’t really sound much like poetry, hence, I call them “poem-like-things.” I’ll admit that they’re just long, skinny essays that veer every now and then into the poetic or lyric. .