Spectreview: Dry Cleaning – New Long Leg

Released: April 2, 2021

Post-Punk
(Spoken Word)
(Alternative)

-MAGENTA-

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“Do everything and feel nothing”

I found one of Dry Cleaning’s introductory EP a couple years back and found a lot to like about their take on British post-punk. Boundary Road Drinks and Snacks sold jams that blurred together like small talk, cohered by Florence Shaw’s deadpan. The whole thing felt like a bird’s-eye view of a dispassionate London, with snippets of conversation captured and laid to tape over ice-cold chords. Back then I wondered, as you do with every band that releases an introductory EP, how much farther they could take a style they’ve so obviously mastered assuming they’d release a full-length later down the road.

Content-wise, New Long Leg is a lot of the same stuff you’d find on that EP, but that’s to be expected. What’s more important is how much the album format serves this band. Using their signature languor as a base, they’re able to tweak the formula in myriad subtle ways to produce a well-rounded picture of a band with a singular vision. More importantly, it’s not quite evident that tweaking is happening until you view the picture as a whole. You could see the first four tracks here as a mirror companion to Boundary Road, from The Fall pastiche “Scratchcard Lanyard” to the drawling “Leafy,” and it would be excellent enough to see a post-punk updating a classic post-punk sound.

But then it keeps rolling and rolling, gaining momentum and depth like a snowball. “Her Hippo” elevates the band’s ennui with a poignant portrait of a person in a constant process of escape, as Tom Dowse’s guitar colors Shaw’s angst like someone trapped on treadmill with moving scenery. “New Long Leg” finds Shaw espousing a new level of misanthropy in a reversal couplet of sweet nothings. “John Wick,” similarly, may be named after an action cop in a tossed-off manner, but it’s menacing and boasts one of Dowse’s best choruses. And “Every Day Carry” compiles the best bits of Shaw’s musings into a logorrheic fount of bleary-eyed snippets bifurcated by a solitary college of guitar that gets right to the heart of the matter. By its end, the band comes fully into focus, surpassing its humble beginnings into something definitive, possibly paradigmatic.

Shaw’s role as the solo vocalist would make her the obvious focal point even without a voice that’s perfect for spoken word. What she does on the mic is not necessarily groundbreaking, but she does do it better than anybody I’ve heard in a while. All of her parts are essentially collages of tossed off mutterings like they were captured flipping through channels of hidden cameras, uttered in a dry tone that’s equal parts exhausted retail worker and obedient AI. Her words don’t just evoke mundanity; they revel in it, wringing it of its poignancy and creating a complete fantasy world from the simplest of foundations. Take “Strong Feelings,” a song destined to be a mainstay in their set, and witness how Shaw inhabits the role of a standoffish weirdo with a strange empathy and a representativeness that becomes clearer the moment “Europe” is uttered.

There’s another part of it, I believe, in their unwillingness to be anything other than themselves. It’s not so much a lack of ambition as it is a collective, lucid understanding of what they do well together. That background heightens “More Big Birds,” which is, to my ears, not only the record’s centerpiece but the band’s best song yet. Nicholas Buxton’s rolling drum beat enters, and Lewis Maynard’s bass parallels the pattern. As the song progresses, it harbors both a melodiousness and a tenderness that feels unprecedented for the four-piece; even Shaw breaks from her atonal speaking style to sing along, as if the clouds suddenly break into a spring sunset. Though I’m nowhere near old enough to remember, I imagine it must have felt like listening to Pavement’s “Here” for the first time and realizing that a group of grinning washouts may be something more, something shielding a potentially unfathomable depth.

Recommended for reheating spag bol after a double shift.