The easy thing to do with Dry Cleaning is to concentrate on Florence Shaw and her laconic, subdued, spoken delivery of lyrics that are almost surreal in their quotidian blankness. But that does a disservice to the other three members of the band, because New Long Leg is the work of a terrifically focused group, whose version of post-punk is far more varied than it might at first appear. Tom Dowse has a knack for insinuating guitar lines – the cascading riff of Unsmart Lady; the simple pattern that underpins Strong Feelings – and sometimes the hooks come from the basslines of Lewis Maynard. There’s not a revolution here: the rulebook of the four-piece indie band is not being rewritten, but even with a conventional singer, singing conventional lyrics, Dry Cleaning would be a superior example of the kind.
All that said, Shaw is the magic ingredient. Her lyrics – snippets of found text, but mostly her own writing – leap out, and have more impact from being delivered conversationally, freed from the rhythms and meter of the music. “Got my shorts on in preparation for the hot, these idiots in trousers, they don’t know what they’re doing,” she intones in Her Hippo, a single line that opens up a dozen possibilities. It’s a shame, then, that her best lyric – the long, dense, allusive Every Day Carry, a succession of seething, lacerating lines – is married to the least interesting music of the record, seven-and-a-half minutes that one suspects are meant to be hypnotic and probably are – live. On record, though? Not so much. Still, this is a debut to be excited about.
