Anyone who came to contemporary cult favourites Dry Cleaning from their first two studio albums might assume they were born from the unprecedented void of lockdown. ‘Do everything, feel nothing,’ goes the chorus of ‘Scratchcard Lanyard’, lead single of 2021’s New Long Leg.
With her forensic brain for language and sense of humour as dry (but not always as clean) as the band name suggests, frontwoman Florence Shaw intones the words over glitteringly frosty guitar, bass, and drums. It could be a manifesto for the disquietingly dulled sensibility of our brand-new-same-old world, where so much art and experience is as remote as it is spectacular.
But what of their pre-pandemic EPs? Compiled on one record as Boundary Road Snacks and Drinks/Sweet Princess and now reissued by 4AD, the first side sounds for a second like it’ll be something familiar and comfortable, or plainly political.
Opener ‘Dog Proposal’ wrong-foots us with the classic indie signifiers of jangling guitar and swooning shoegaze vocals until Shaw’s conversational rant about capitalistic veneration of hard work plunges us down to earth. As soon the second verse right-angles into a reeled-off list of football merchandise, things grow less predictable still.
Similarly, Shaw’s opening sneer on the spiky ‘Jam After School’ sets us up for a takedown of toxic masculinity before the lyrics swing instead towards a fragmented collage of imagery, orbiting… well, what exactly? Quaint, profitable, cosy-sexy notions of an imagined England? (‘Imaginary hot romance with Daniel Day Lewis / Welcome to the county of Hampshire / Jam After School’).
Her poet’s knack for ‘making it new’ is just as pronounced on ‘Sombre One’, which true to its title sees the guitar repeating in a slow, circular, funereal chime. Shaw’s delivery is almost invasively intimate, but it’s also so clipped and precise that any emotional affect gets sheared off.
‘Rest in heavenly peace / Bet on these sports games / Don’t ride this rollercoaster,’ she recites, setting slivers of use-worn instructive language under a harsh new light and showing up their common peculiarity. But for all this, there is the occasional flash of a softer, warmer band. The chorus of ‘Viking Hair’, led into with siren-like whoops, is charged with a romantic passion only undercut by the choppy backing and the absurdity of the verses.
Even so, it’s not until Boundary Road Snacks and Drinks’ closing track, ‘Sit Down Meal’, that Dry Cleaning yield to something almost straightforward. The chorus finds Shaw singing at last, in an indie-pop voice as unaffected as that of Young Marble Giants’ Alison Statton. The subtext of yearning cuts through like a lighthouse beam rather than poking out obliquely – ‘We shared a sit down meal / Sometimes I get numb arms in bed / You’re nothing but a fragrance to me now’.
Although Boundary Road makes up side one of the record, the band released and recorded Sweet Princess first, before they had ever performed live. Its opener ‘Goodnight’ sets us up for a bouncier, scrappier affair, their own answer to Jilted John. But Shaw lifts her lyrics here from the comments sections of Aphex Twin YouTube videos, and both that notorious techno goblin and the World Wide Web were after young John’s time.
Shaw told the Quietus that online, ‘the tone and nuance of what [the commenters are] saying is completely stripped away’. Her delivery uncannily replicates the flattened feeling of browsing the Internet, where everything from the grimmest news stories to the lightest jokes feels levelled to the same plane of reality or unreality.
Being an art school graduate, it doesn’t seem too much of a stretch to suggest Shaw’s closest creative antecedent is faux naïf pop-surrealist master David Shrigley. ‘New Job’ is an especially deft showcase of her Shrigley-esque ability to draw out bizarre humour and disconcerting pathos from supposedly innocuous utterances. She delivers what sounds like overheard snatches of conversation in a hurried, neurotic mutter, rattling gradually from the mundane to the hallucinatory (‘Haha it wasn’t a snake after all, phew! / It was just a pile of mushrooms growing in the shape of a snake’).
It’s the choppy, shingle-sharp ‘Magic of Meghan’ which may be the most discussed track from either of the two EPs, born as it was from Shaw’s obsession with Meghan Markle’s engagement. She rubs excerpts from interviews with the couple against a Daily Mail Facebook post about Markle’s clothes, hinting but never stating that even the most flattering pieces of tabloid journalism conceal snide, prurient acts of misdirection.
This theme turns up again in ‘Traditional Fish’, a sudden slowdown which sees Shaw recounting commercial goods and services between a glacial riff. Tellingly, the only action in the lyrics comes near the end, when she rattles off a list of supermarket tabloid headlines. Trivial sensationalism, it suggests, is the easiest and most pernicious way to stave off boredom.
But you could never accuse ‘Phone Scam’ of being boring. All lively, jagged new wave cross-fertilised with Tarantino-soundtrack pop, it’s one of the catchiest things they’ve come up with. Guitarist Tom Dowse executes a surf-rock run which lands in a slinky shuffle suggestive of Jonathan Richman’s ‘Egyptian Reggae’, and Shaw tops it all off with some heavy-grade profanity to boot.
Lewis Maynard’s purring bassline graces the melodic closing track, ‘Conversation’, while the spare lyrics acutely target the impossibility of honest communication in modern society. ‘I come across strange / He’s saying “be yourself”’ she sing-songs. ‘But if I’m myself, I come across strange / My jokes don’t land’.
‘To get through life and be social and perform everyday tasks, you have to put something on, and I think that the way I am on stage and when I’m recording the vocals is a more authentic me than who I am the rest of the time,’ Shaw told Loud and Quiet. If there’s one thing we can learn from Dry Cleaning, it’s that self-expression doesn’t always have to be an overwrought performance of raw vulnerability.
It can be prickly and odd, cracking open its own meaning from other people’s words. On Boundary Road Snacks and Drinks/Sweet Princess, it’s a pleasure to hear a band as forbiddingly funny and brainy as Dry Cleaning being themselves to full effect, in the final moments before they staked their rightful claim to the world.
Boundary Road Snacks and Drinks/Sweet Princess is out now via 4AD – order via this link
Find out more about Dry Cleaning on their official website
Review by Poppy Bristow
Photography by Hanna-Katrina Jedrosz
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