Dry Cleaning: Secret Love Review – The South London band doubles down on their achingly bizarre brilliance | Dry cleaning

Dry Cleaning’s third album contains a lot of strikingly strange lyrics. Take your pick from “space sub-mushrooms, or go to the gym to get fit”; “My dream house is a negative space of rocks”; Or, actually, “When I was a kid, I wanted to be a horse, eating onions, carrots, and celery.” But it’s a much sharper line on the surface, from the 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 comes to a close, the powerful guitar riff that propelled it transforming into a three-dimensional scrabble.

At first, the lyric seems to be describing what dry cleaning does, and Shaw in particular. From the moment they first emerged with their 2018 EP Sweet Princess, the south London quartet have attracted adjectives like “surreal”, “mysterious” and “mysterious”. Most of the British bands that emerged around the same time carrying a roughly equivalent combination of post-punk guitar and spoken word vocals sounded angry, sarcastic, or straight up comical. Dry cleaning, on the other hand, seemed mysterious. Shaw’s lyrics were collages of overheard notes, recycled YouTube comments, lines of ads and non-sequiturs, delivered in a voice too cold to sound awkward. It has been variously described as “bland” and “achromatic”, but can most clearly be described as sounding politely dull. She occasionally switches from speaking to singing in an unstudied voice that brings to mind a line by Stuart Moxham from Young Marble Giants about their understated vocalist Alison Staton sounding “like she’s at a bus stop or something.” The whole thing was interestingly puzzling: there were songs that could actually contain hidden messages, which seemed like unsolvable mysteries.

But the line in Cruise Ship Designer is more complex than a straightforward description of its technical process. It’s delivered not by Shaw, but through her, as the song’s apocalyptic hero spouts hackneyed platitudes about his chosen profession: “Designing cruisers is, to me, a privilege and a lesson… It’s a strong boat for a strong mind.” In context, he seems to be mocking the idea of ​​flooding your work with hidden messages as hopeless pretentiousness: And if that’s what you think… I With it, the subtext runs, you’re completely wrong.

And for all the bizarre imagery (“salt, sugar, lively dishtowels, a lava skylight, hell’s mouth”), the songs on Secret Love suggest that Shaw’s true skill as a songwriter may lie in something more real and directly affecting than laying out mysteries for listeners to unravel. When she’s not misrepresenting the claims of cruise ship designers — or rather, using the character of a cruise ship designer to interrogate the ways in which people feel driven to justify their most questionable decisions — she’s very good at sketching excruciating vignettes of seemingly mundane lives that, upon closer examination, spiral out of control: the narrator of My Soul/Half Pint, who presents her refusal to clean her house as a bold feminist protest, is far more disturbed. From what appeared for the first time; Evil influencer Evil Idiot, who offers health advice that is not only useless but potentially harmful; The master of the Edge depicted in blood, whose cynicism and misanthropy turn to bloody violence.

The main character of “Let Me Grow and You’ll See the Fruit” begins the song praising the joys of a lonely day off — “No one comes with a video call or a poll or a dick pic” — but ends the song by demonstrating their loneliness and alienation: “The world’s laughing at me, I’m a disaster.” These songs never sound like a smart person, even though it’s clear that the lyricist behind them is. They also don’t feel weird for the sake of weirdness: they have a real emotional impact at a gut level.

You can point to the poignancy and empathy in Shaw’s words as one of the reasons why dry cleaning stands out amidst the vogue com. sprechgesang Indie. There’s also the band’s ability to connect their lyrical journeys with concise, pointed, poignant songs and their musical reach. If vinegar-distorted guitar remains their main thrust on Secret Love, the sound of the album – produced by fellow left-winger Kate Le Bon – ventures noticeably outside of that territory, into machine-driven 80s funk on opener Hit My Head All Day; An ominous sound and slow-burning atmosphere on Evil Evil Idiot; I need mounted drones. There’s even a hint of distorted folk about the guitar character pushing a secret love (hidden in a drawing of a boy). It all works, to powerful effect. The sense of a band that has transcended its original remit has transcended the initial WTF? It’s hard to miss the value of modernity, and confidently transition into new spaces.

Secret Love will be released on January 9

Alexis listened this week to

Sharp Pins – Popafangout
The Christmas/New Year lull gives you a chance to catch up on things you’ve missed, and Sharp Pins’ 1965 pop re-creation is a joy: it’s clearly not doing anything new, but it does what it does beautifully.