With New Long Leg, Dry Cleaning lead the renaissance of British ‘monologue rock’
4/5
The arty Brighton quartet’s debut album is an engrossingly energetic fusion of the mundane, the surreal and the downright bizarre
New Long Leg is the debut album by the Brighton quartet Dry Cleaning
Credit: Pooneh Ghana
“I just want to put something positive in the world but it’s hard because I’m so full of poisonous rage,” drawls Florence Shaw in tones of exquisite boredom. While her band, Dry Cleaning, stir up a furious squall of post-punk energy on their debut album New Long Leg, their frontwoman, a former art-school lecturer, maintains an indifference to melody or emotion unmatched since Grace Jones’s 1980s pomp.
Dry Cleaning [L-R: Nick Buxton, Florence Shaw, Tom Dowse, Lewis Maynard] Photo Credit: Steve Gullick Praise for Dry Cleaning “The most exciting guitar bands of recent times.” – The Wire “Cerebral, caustic, exhilarating debut.” – MOJO .
Dry Cleaning Spit Back the Unending Noise of the World on New Long Leg
Published Apr 01, 2021
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Florence Shaw writes a song like a bowerbird builds a nest, with an obsessive fixation for colourful garbage. On Dry Cleaning s debut full-length,
New Long Leg, Shaw weaves new language from journal pages and YouTube comments, advertisements, headlines, haircuts and spoiled food, turning ordinary detritus into something fantastical and useful. Bolstered by lush production from John Parish, Tom Dowse s riffs take on a new depth and Lewis Maynard and Nick Buxton s kinetic rhythms are accented with shakers, drum machines and handclaps.
New Long Leg is a bristling and steely-eyed statement of intent, introducing Shaw as an anthropologist of the everyday, or, as she deadpans on the sinewy Strong Feelings : Just an emo dead stuff collector / Things come to the brain.
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Today Shaw puts her restlessly inquisitive personality to use as the lead vocalist for one of the most exciting bands in rock. Dry Cleaning’s debut album,
New Long Leg, is due out April 2nd after a pair of 2019 EPs that hit like telepathic firecrackers from another planet. Shaw’s unique lyrical style is a big part of what sets Dry Cleaning apart from a thousand other 21st-century U.K. guitar bands. On songs like the recent single “Strong Feelings,” she recites disjointed monologues in an eerily calm tone over dank, arty rumbles courtesy of guitarist Tom Dowse, bassist Lewis Maynard, and drummer Nick Buxton: “Just an emo dead-stuff collector/Things come to the brain/I spent £17 on mushrooms for you. … I’ve been thinking about eating that hot dog for hours …” The meanings of her words can be obscure or startlingly direct, disturbing or quite funny, and the music is always charged with intense feeling. It’s a refreshingly off-kilter combination that could only co