I haven’t been to a dry cleaner in years, for the simple reason that I don’t see the need to dry clean my Pablo Cruise t-shirt, or my Brian Jonestown Massacre t-shirt, or my Altamont Was Groovy t-shirt, and I could go on because all I own are t-shirts, unless you count a Grateful Dead hoodie that garners me all kinds of compliments but I’ll be forever ambivalent about because it has those awful dancing bears on it.
It was a gift. I hate those goddamn dancing bears.
But I’m a big fan of dry cleaning, or rather Dry Cleaning, the South London quartet that has made a name for themselves by combining angular, guitar-driven post-punk with the stream-of-consciousness spoken word musings of sometimes university lecturer Florence Shaw. When it comes to Dry Cleaning’s music think The Fall, Gang of Four, Wire, Magazine, Joy Division, PiL, and I could go on.
Shaw is the draw; she makes Dry Cleaning one of a kind for the simple reason you never know what’s going to come out of her mouth. Early on she relied on snatching words and phrases from found texts, but as time went on she began to use her own words, riffing on this, that, and everything really. Who else would toss the line “I’ve been thinking of eating that hot dog for hours” into the middle of a song? Shaw has this wonderful (and deliciously discombobulating) ability to lure you into the realms of the mundane before dropping an atomic bomb on you, of abruptly switching gears from seeming serenity to anger or from the quotidian to the absurd. Following her progress through a song is always a fascinating experience.
Dry Cleaning are Shaw on vocals, Tom Dowse on guitar, keyboards, and tape loops, Lewis Maynard on bass, and Nick Buxton on drums, percussion, programming, keyboards, and saxophone. Dry Cleaning have released two full lengths (2021’s New Long Leg and 2022’s Stumpwork) and a trio of EPs since they coaxed Shaw into joining the fold, but my favorite is their debut EP, 2018’s “Sweet Princess.” Why? Because it’s Dry Cleaning at their rawest and most primal. They’ve gradually sweetened things up and gotten slicker, accentuating the groove and using drum machines, while Shaw has done a bit of actual singing.
And they pull it off. “Scratchyard Lanyard” and “Strong Feelings” from New Long Leg are brilliant examples of their more polished and streamlined sound, and Shaw’s dream pop singing/spoken word approach on “Dog Proposal,” “Viking Hair,” and “Sit Down Meal” from Dry Cleaning’s 2019 EP “Boundary Road Snacks and Drinks” proves she can do more than just talk talk talk. But I prefer the raw to the cooked, and “Sweet Princess” is as raw as Dry Cleaning get.
Make no mistake: Dry Cleaning are an appropriately arid proposition, cerebral formalists who are easier to admire than to love. But on “Sweet Princess” the band plays with real urgency, and Shaw often sounds pissed, as in angry not drunk. Opener “Goodnight” proceeds at an off-kilter rockabilly canter; the bass gallops, the guitar is pure Joy Division, while Shaw astounds and astounds and astounds, from the opening lines, which will give you a good idea of what she’s all about:
“During what was probably the longest two and a half months of my life
After a near death experience
I could not sleep
I was on edge at all times
The only thing that kept me going was Saw Two.”
After that she reminisces about her dead cat (the Sweet Princess of the title) and shares memories of her childhood stays at her grandparent’s home, but she’s always undercutting the emotion with sudden bursts of from-out-of-nowhere rage (“How dare you, I’m the best at what I do/How fucking dare you, don’t touch me/You stole my childhood CDs, you fuck”) and absolute jaw-droppers along the lines of “She said, ‘Have you ever spat cum onto the carpet of a Travelodge?’” “Goodnight” comes off like a Burroughs-school cut-up of Marcel Proust and Lydia Lunch, and that’s what so wonderful about it. “I need you all to shut up,” she says at one point. “I’m having a tough time.”
“New Job” proceeds at a perky but not frenetic pace, and features lots of angular guitar and sudden stops and starts. Shaw opens it with some sung “Fa fa fa’s,” then goes into a frenetic monologue about meeting someone and thinking there was a connection but no:
“I thought you liked me
But maybe I was just a captive audience
You did seem a bit bored when I was talking.”
And after that Shaw is all over the place, tossing off non sequiturs like “Jimmy and Olga, love forever” and
“What’s your favorite book, Steve?
That’s a good question
I think it would be The Count of Monte Cristo.”
Which she promptly follows with
“Can you walk on the tracks?
No, no, people can’t walk on the tracks
Only trains can walk on the tracks.”
I don’t know what any of this has to do with a job new or anything else, but it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that Shaw thrusts you into the realm of the banal inexplicable. You can almost see the ghost of Alfred Jarry nodding his approval from whatever dimension he now exists in, especially when she drops the lines, “The longer we go on like this/The more burnt the dinner will be, Paula.” Shaw has the uncanny ability to put you in the shoes of Dylan’s Mr. Jones—something’s happening, but you don’t know what it is.
“Magic of Meghan” is all urgent guitar and bass and drum push and proceeds at a frantic clip, and has Shaw mixing her own thoughts with those she’s read in the press regarding (then) new member of the British royal family, Meghan Markle. No anti-royalist ala Morrissey is Shaw: “Dry Cleaning think Meghan is really great,” she told one interviewer. You get quotes from Harry (“I fell in love with Meghan so incredibly quickly”), public encomiums (“Thank you for all you’re doing, we love you/You’re just what England needs, you’re going to change us”), and what you’re left with is a sense that Shaw is having us on, even if she isn’t. There’s an ambiguity to the song; you wait for the sarcastic line that will undercut everything she’s saying but it never comes, except possibly at the very end when she says, “It’s okay/It doesn’t matter.” Bottom line is Shaw seems to honestly admire Markle, and to smell sexism and condescension in the press’ treatment of her. In fact she’s said as much.
“Traditional Fish” is a crawl, you get some amped-up and fucked up guitar, then Shaw speaks, then you get more guitar, then the drums come in and that’s how the song proceeds, big angular riff, Shaw speaks, big angular riff, repeat, although the guitar does go walkabout in the middle of the song. Meanwhile Shaw reels off random and exhaustive lists of incongruous things none of which are particularly interesting (“Seafood, meats, synthetic hair, human hair, wigs/Dining set, beds and wardrobes”) and I’m assuming that’s the point. We’ve entered the realm of the dada banal and things don’t get interesting until she says,
“Who’s the Pride of Britain?
Michelle blasts Mark
I was shot in the head by my kid.”
That last line stops you in your tracks, and she follows it with a song-closing, “Err… Err…. Oof!” Not the best song on the album, but definitely the most uncompromising. Is it a condemnation of commercialism, consumerism, capitalism, the banality of existence? Bore us to death with our desires, now there’s a concept.
The clamorous and mid-tempo “Phone Scam” pushes and shoves you, all jagged and discordant guitar lines, big bass and sideways drums, on which Shaw goes on about a phone scam that seems to consist of her being abused by the woman on the line:
“She said I was a horrible cunt
She said I was a bastard
She screamed and screamed, ‘I don’t want to touch it.’”
“I had the feeling that what she was saying was a script,” says Shaw, totally deadpan. “She said I was a dickhead,” says Shaw, deadpan again, before concluding “I felt very vulnerable that it was some kind of a scam/Because I’ve been conned before.” Some scam, that. I spent a good half-hour trying to figure the angle.
“Conversation” is more phone talk, and boasts a remorseless and grinding drive that never lets up. Shaw opens up with a “Brrring-brrring, brrring-brrring, brrring-brrring, hello?”, then Dowse goes off on these brittle guitar tangents, and while the music’s swell I wish more happened on Shaw’s end. She enlivens things by talking about her “Fast and furious life/Followed by another porn account on Instagram” before asking, “Am I on a date right now? Is this a date?” But the heart of the song seems to be an (honest?) confession of social awkwardness:
“I come across strange
He’s saying, “Be yourself, be yourself”
But if I’m myself
People think I’m strange
My jokes don’t land
People say, “What’s that? Pardon?”
Which makes me go ho-hum. And nothing much else happens before she closes things down with a mundane
“Emailed by the takeaway
Emailed by the takeaway again
Emailed by the takeaway
Emailed by the takeaway again
Emailed by the takeaway.”
Rather a disappointment lyrically, but the song itself is killer.
People have compared Shaw to Mark E. Smith but she not’s nearly as cryptic. Lucky for her she’s not nearly as self-consciously avant garde as Laurie Anderson, but Dry Cleaning live or die on Shaw’s words and while she works some real miracles on “Sweet Princess” (and elsewhere) I can’t help but think there’s room for improvement.
Dry Cleaning have promise, and they’ll achieve that promise when Shaw’s lyrics consistently stun me, the way the lyrics of Sleaford Mods or Viagra Boys do. Robert Christgau, who likes “Sweet Princess” as much as I do, rather cruelly dismissed Stumpwork with the words, “Not quite a poet and she don’t quite know it.” I think he’s too hard on Shaw, but he has a point.
Dry Cleaning are a bit too dry for their own good. Shaw can change that by upping the absurdist quotient, and making each and every new train of thought a shocker. Message to Florence: Fuck the mundane. Let your freak flag fly!
GRADED ON A CURVE:
B+
