Dry Cleaning - New Long Leg Review
Shaw tends to get most of the plaudits for her lyrical style, with her narratives likened to Phoebe Waller-Bridge, but the relationship between the guitar and bass really helps them to stand out from other bands with the same spoken-word aesthetic.
When I first heard Dry Cleaning’s 2019’s Sweet Princess EP, I was really excited; if I had any talent to make music, I would have wanted it to sound basically exactly like that. The angular, energetic guitar riffs, the crunchy bass, and the cutting, humorous, but surprisingly introspective spoken-word lyrics really spoke to me — I loved it. As such, I had been anxious to hear new music from them for quite a while, and was notably buzzed at the announcement of this new record, New Long Leg, alongside lead single ‘Scratchcard Lanyard’. This new release takes a more sombre tone, with lead singer, Florence Shaw, sounding almost dreamy rather than the sarcastic, at times angry, character previously explored. Now in a milieu of many interesting, boundary-pushing London-based post-punk bands, Dry Cleaning still manage to find a unique voice here, though possibly in a less exciting fashion than some of their contemporaries.
The opener, ‘Scratchcard Lanyard’, is a perfect lead single for this album. While introducing the sound present in the majority of the tracks here, it is also easily the biggest banger on the record. Its energy harks back in a way to what I loved about that first EP, with equal amounts of punchy guitar tone and lyrical absurdism. In their typical abstract first-person way, those lyrics reminisce to childhood memories tinted with Shaw’s usual struggle to fit in. The odd, envious outsider who just wants “to be weird and hide for a bit”, who tries everything only to feel nothing, and for whom the red mist falls when she sees people who have it together. Despite the summery, concert-banger aesthetic of the track, its themes are still quite dark.
This intriguing lyricism continues throughout the album, with particular highlights around the middle in ‘Leafy’ and ‘New Long Leg’. The former is quite instrumentally sparse by Dry Cleaning’s standards, though in a way that becomes more normal to them throughout this album. Lyrically, it takes a similarly retrospective direction to ‘Scratchcard Lanyard’, looking at old times with school friends, juxtaposing frustration (“An exhausting walk in the horrible countryside/A tiresome swim in a pointless bit of sea”) and nostalgia (“Knackering drinks with close friends”). In typical fashion, it meanders from this a little, touching briefly on loneliness, drugs, and moving out. ‘New Long Leg’ reaches its lyrical peak in the first verse, touching on the themes of anxiety explored in that excellent first EP, with all the questions going through the narrator’s head before a holiday, then the aforementioned joke that doesn’t land from ‘Conversation’: “Are thеre some kind of reverse platform shoes that make you go into the ground more, make you reach a lower level? Never mind”.
‘Her Hippo’, an image of escapism set against dreamy, textured guitars reminiscent of their second EP, also has some interesting lyrics in it, though like the joke there are a couple of lines that don’t land, such as the oh-so-melodramatic the-world-is-against-me chorus: “I’m smiling constantly, and people constantly step on me”. Asides from this, there are some good lines: there’s the vivid line about the arsehole in a mirror; the transition between verses, asking “And where does that romantic jealousy come from?”; and the charming couplet “More espresso, less depresso”. The escapism depicted, according to Shaw, is “out of the frying pan, into the fire”, rather than the grass is greener cliché usually found here.
Crucially, Shaw is not the only member of the band; the others hold a key role in their identity too. On some tracks, it is really guitarist Tom Dowse and bassist Lewis Maynard who take centre stage. The way they construct the tracks together can be really unique, particularly on ‘A.L.C.’ where it sounds almost as if the two instruments are speaking to each other throughout the song, creating quite an interesting separation between them — which also shows itself nicely on ‘More Big Birds’. In ‘Strong Feelings’, Maynard’s bass adds the energy on the otherwise rather sparse sounding track, as Dowse teases us into the guitar riff that slow dances around the mix from the second verse, creating again this dreamy atmosphere which finds its way into many of the tracks on the album. They also dominate the other single, ‘Unsmart Lady’ but in a slightly less flattering way where it starts to drown out Shaw’s vocals — though those aren’t particularly interesting here anyway.
The closer, ‘Every Day Carry’, is almost eight minutes long, featuring a lengthy, repetitive, distorted-guitar interlude between what feels effectively like two different songs. The former is swirling, dreamy, almost shoegazey. It’s relatively chilled and leads well into the interlude, but has fairly little to say itself, stylistically or lyrically; it definitely works better as half of a song. Together, however, the two parts tell the story of a relationship. The former, with a couple possibly meeting again after a long time; the latter, upping the tempo, an ode to the anger of being hurt by the other person. All of this comes in her usual idiosyncratic way, with blunt imagery, stream-of-consciousness narrative and some childlike insults. While it’s a harder one to get into right away, this track’s storytelling is some of the strongest on the record.
Having toned down the immediacy, Dry Cleaning continue to charm with this record. Enjoying a boost in exposure, they have drawn comparisons to many other bands under the “post-punk” umbrella, from Life Without Buildings to The Wire, but they demonstrate a relatively unique sound here. Shaw tends to get most of the plaudits for her lyrical style, with her narratives likened to Phoebe Waller-Bridge, but the relationship between the guitar and bass really helps them to stand out from other bands with the same spoken-word aesthetic. At times, the vocals seem lost and the occasional forgettable track on the latter half of the album hinders the project. But New Long Leg leaves me excited for Dry Cleaning’s future work.
