For decades, the greatest musical pioneers have found new pleasures in the sonically transgressive – the loud and abrasive, the warped and wonky, the corroded and incoherent.
Now, perhaps struggling for new ways to mess with music, they’ve turned to the dull. South London’s Dry Cleaning, named after the most unengaging form of domestic maintenance, are prime movers in the new wave of Sprechgesang post-punk; while the band knock together backing tracks from stray bits of saxophone, bass, synth, guitar and junk shop percussion, Florence Shaw largely improvises surrealist spoken-word lyrics that sound freshly plucked from the internal dialogue of Philomena Cunk.
