The songwriting on Due North is outstanding. That, and Kazar’s piano and guitar work, put him up there with Lindsey Buckingham and Joe Jackson in my opinion. This was one of the brightest spots of a gloomy year.
This double-album is one of the most beautiful records about death that you’ve ever heard. It’s grand, glorious, and resonant after a year when all of us lost someone – either within our own homes, across the street, or on the other side of the globe.
It’s no coincidence that Dry Cleaning’s first proper U.S. tour sold out at nearly every stop. They’re the queen and kings of British post-punk right now, and New Long Leg – their first full-length album – is a great follow-up to their multiple EPs (all of which were also excellent).
The second Levitation Sessions album from Osees was somehow wilder than the first. Livestreaming it in our home at loud volume during lockdown was a blissful escape for the entire time. The set included plenty of deep cuts, including multiple Chrome covers.
Recorded during their set night at The Chapel music venue in San Francisco, and just before the pandemic shut down touring for everyone everywhere, this live album is one of Osees’ best. It captures the chaos of their shows, highlights some of their prog-rock love, and served as a reminder to stay healthy and take care of each other so we could get back to seeing concerts again.
British post-bunkers Dry Cleaning have a way of combining angular, jagged, rollicking chords, riffs, and drum fills with spoken word vocals that is difficult to describe and even more difficult for anyone to attempt to emulate. Front woman Florence Shaw is one of the wittiest and most enigmatic lyricists out there right now, and her bandmates (Nick Buxton – drums, Tom Dowse – guitar, and Lewis Maynard – bass) are wild craftsmen in their own right. Their first full-length album, New Long Leg, is a cool record that’s a little tighter than their previous EPs, made so by having plenty of time to tweak tracks and explore new sounds thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic cancelling their 2020 tour, but no less intriguing.
Maynard’s bass is something the Delta 5 would love on the opening track, “Scratchcard Lanyard,” while Shaw tells us, “It’s okay, I just need to be weird and hide for a bit and eat an old sandwich from my bag.” Haven’t we all felt like that at some point since March 2020? “Unsmart Lady” starts with a wild cacophony and then settles into a solid rock groove from Dowse that reminds me of good Foreigner tracks. Shaw also lets you know how to find a girlfriend: “If you like a girl, be nice. It’s not rocket science.”
My favorite lyric of Shaw’s on “Strong Feelings” is “That seems like a lot of garlic.” It comes out of nowhere among Buxton’s tight, yet slippery beats. “Leafy” seems to be about a break-up with Shaw singing about cleaning out a house (“What about all the uneaten sausages?”) while her bandmates seem to be playing a different song in another room. This is the kind of song Dry Cleaning does so well. Shaw seems to be doing her own thing while Buxton, Dowse, and Maynard are jamming on their own, but both elements somehow perfectly combine.
It will be a crime if Dry Cleaning doesn’t produce merchandise that reads “More espresso, less depresso.” – a great lyric from the jangly, yet smooth “Her Hippo.” The title track, with its stabbing guitar riffs, has Shaw musing over the idea of going on a cruise while she’s stuck at home due to every travel plan getting cancelled last year. “If you’re an Aries, then I’m an Aries,” Shaw says, perhaps flirtatiously, on “John Wick” – which has nothing to do with an Uber-assassin and more to do with old men griping about things that don’t matter. Dowse’s guitar on it is almost the sound of these men bitching about Antiques Roadshow and the trash truck running late.
Shaw’s vocals sound slightly electronic / robotic on “More Big Birds,” almost turning her into a computer voice. It’s a slight touch, but instantly intriguing. I’d love to know the story behind “ALC” because it starts with Shaw telling someone, “You can’t just come into my garden in your football kit and start asking questions about who lives here. Who’s asking?”
The closer, “Every Day Carry,” is a wild, psychedelic trip that has Dowse, Maynard, and Buxton playing a cool psych-jazz / post-punk blend in a dark club in the back of a former clock factory while Shaw sings / speaks about topics ranging from chocolate chips cookies and imminent domain construction to cab drivers and geese. There’s a great breakdown about halfway through when the band dissolves into a noise rock jam and then kicks back into gear with swirling sounds and Shaw’s voice and lyrics being the eye of their hurricane. It ends like a power outage.
New Long Leg is setting the bar high for other post-punk bands (or any other genre, really) to follow in 2021. Dry Cleaning’s forced vacation did wonders for their creative energy and focus, and for our ears.
Keep your mind open.
[Stretch your legs over to the subscription box while you’re here.]
London-based band Dry Cleaning – Nick Buxton (drums), Tom Dowse (guitar), Lewis Maynard (bass) and Florence Shaw (vocals) – announce their debut album, New Long Leg, out April 2nd on 4AD, and present a new single/video, “Strong Feelings.” Buoyed by the universal acclaim they received for 2019 EPs Boundary Road Snacks and Drinks and Sweet Princess, the foursome spent more and more of their lives on tour, refining their craft even further. The intensive time they spent together meant they developed a near-psychic knowledge of how to leave the right amount of space for each other in their songs. The resulting New Long Leg is more ambitious and complex, with Shaw’s spoken vocals tightly intertwined with the band’s restless instrumentals. With lyrics preoccupied by themes like dissociation, escapism, daydreaming, complicated feelings of love, anger, revenge, anxiety, the kitchen, lethargy, forgetfulness, and survival, Shaw says, “the title is ambiguous; a new long leg could be an expensive present or a growth or a table repair.”
When the coronavirus pandemic hit in March, forcing a swift end to their US tour, Dry Cleaning had their new songs demoed, but had to bide their time before they could enter the studio. They contributed a few new recordings – one being last year’s “Scratchcard Lanyard” – passing a Tascam four-track cassette recorder to one another from the window of Maynard’s car, cleaning it with antibacterial wipes before recording their parts one by one. Facilitated by the unexpected time apart and the introspection of lockdown, Buxton started experimenting with drum machines, Dowse with a noisier, more deconstructed guitar sound, Maynard with subtler and more flexible basslines.
By June John Parish had emerged as the perfect producer and was keen to explore these creative developments. The band holed up with him at Rockfield Studios in rural Wales for two weeks, finding this isolation from the outside world “liberating,” as Buxton puts it. They got on well with Parish, buoyed by his enthusiasm, directness, and full-bodied commitment, and he was unafraid to push them when he sensed a song could be refined or taken in a different direction. “It’s not just sheer pent-up energy all the time in the way that the first two EPs were,” adds Shaw of the resultant album. “I feel more confident with leaving gaps.”
There’s tension when they duel with one another, satisfaction when they move in snaking tandem, and breathless anticipation when she steps back for a moment to let the music build. She’s constantly speeding up and slowing down, alliterating, repeating, rhyming, umming, erring and stuttering with pinpoint accuracy. These methods are prevalent in new single “Strong Feelings.” A love song of sorts, Shaw says, “it’s about secretly being in love with someone who doesn’t know it, and Brexit’s disruptive role in romantic relationships.” Its accompanying visuals, directed by guitarist Dowse, came about after Google searches brought together an informational video on road building basics from New Zealand and Massachusetts-based glitch artist, Sabato Visconti.
Firm friends for years, Dry Cleaning only started making music after a karaoke party in 2017 inspired a collaboration. They wrote instrumentally to begin with until six months later Florence Shaw, a visual artist, university lecturer and picture researcher by day – with no prior musical experience – turned up to a band rehearsal with a copy of Michael Bernard Loggins’ Fears Of Your Life to read out over the music. Before long she was the group’s frontperson, contributing words of her own, and serving as the perfect foil to the band’s music. Shaw extracts the most immense meaning from the most trivial things; she peppers the songs with a thousand tiny details, little witty asides about supermarkets, cupboards, beauty products and body parts add up to sonic landscapes that teem with the strange magic of ordinary life.
New Long Leg Tracklist 1. Scratchcard Lanyard 2. Unsmart Lady 3. Strong Feelings 4. Leafy 5. Her Hippo 6. New Long Leg 7. John Wick 8. More Big Birds 9. A.L.C 10. Every Day Carry
