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.
“Things are s*** but they’re gonna be OK and I’m gonna see otters,” she mutters on “Kwenchy Kups”. “Gary Ashby” concerns the titular lost family tortoise. “Woah, just killed a giant wolf,” she deadpans on the title track, in the sort of unflustered monotone that suggests she’s never actually killed a giant wolf in her life.
Your reaction to their second album Stumpwork will very much depend on how riveting you find eavesdropping on half-heard conversations at the next table while day-drinking around Peckham’s open-mic sessions. The band concoct some interesting background ideas that stretch the remit of last year’s debut New Long Leg. They’re a jazz Pixies on “Driver’s Story”. A funk gig in the Upside Down on “Hot Penny Day”. Pavement during a soundcheck on the six minutes of atonal guitar clanging that constitutes “No Decent Shoes For Rain”.
There are moments of Smithsian flourish (“Conservative Hell”, “Kwenchy Kups”) and passionless Fall (“Don’t Press Me”). But it’s all rendered dreary by Shaw’s one-note meanderings about gaming mouses, brain parasites and Arctic expeditions she isn’t on. Ultimately, Dry Cleaning start to sound like a one-song idea dragged out over two albums. A slog.
