Florence Shaw is easy to talk to. That may sound trite, but it’s the first thing I notice about her during our Zoom call that despite the hint of nervousness in her voice, she’s chill and unpretentious, easy to get a laugh out of. Not that I expected a difficult interview, but perhaps her vivacious energy came as a surprise coming from the cryptic singer-songwriter I’m faced with when I listen to her band Dry Cleaning, a post-punk outfit out of South London.
Photo illustration by Renee Klahr, NPR/Courtesy of the artists
Top row, left to right: Yard Act, Squid, Black Country, New Road. Bottom row: Legss, Shame, Dry Cleaning.
May 06, 2021
Matthew Perpetua
When the British band Squid released the single Narrator in January, everything about it felt like a dare. The song s sprawling length 8:29 is posted on the cover art, scrambling expectations and heralding greater ambitions from a group best known at that point for a frenzied punk tune, Houseplants. Narrator traps that same energy within a tight Krautrock-ish groove, and when that wears out, the song coasts onwards with two spoken-word parts that illustrate feeling caught in the gravity of a self-absorbed person, the kind who lives as though they re the main character and everyone else is just a walk-on. It s a weird but effective set of contrasts wild but controlled, artsy but focused on basic physical response, berserk emotion colliding with detached erudition. In other
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Promises
Five years in the making,
Promises is a stunning fusion of classical, jazz and ambient electronica, involving a remarkable set of collaborators, said Ludovic Hunter-Tilney in the FT. Floating Points is the recording name of the acclaimed British composer and producer Sam Shepherd. Pharoah Sanders is the American saxophonist who, with John Coltrane, pioneered “spiritual jazz”. The third component is a 29-strong string section from the London Symphony Orchestra.
Over nine seamless movements lasting 46 minutes in total, they have created an immersive and richly detailed work, said Kitty Empire in The Observer.
Promises combines “highly sophisticated” cosmic psychedelia with jazz saxophone interventions, weird drones and rustles, and electronic birdsong, as “the mood swings from succour to awe and back again many times”. Halfway through, the LSO strings arrive “adding depth and weight”.