So now they’ve made the weird second album that any band can throw out that’s progressed so far with their debut that going further, faster, higher, prettier, and smarter would have been silly nonsense. With STUMPWORK, Dry Cleaning leave the comfort zone of the younger British post-punk wonder, into which they were sorted alongside the bands Black Country, New Road, Squid and Black Midi, which quickly rose to become top dogs – not least because the narrative from the United Kingdom is looking for variation , irritation and a bit of “Magic Of Meghan” demanded.
Singer and lyricist Florence Shaw, who joined the band in 2017 as a visual artist with no previous musical knowledge, also puts the exclamation point behind the songs of the south Londoners on the new album with her sometimes provocatively wispy lyrics. She is able to illustrate the absurdity of existence like a report, she can quote Anne Clark coolness or sincerely cultivate sound space, her laconic murmur is the super sound that runs through the often unwieldy pieces – we catch sentence break points, that’s enough.
STUMPWORK has become a courageous record, because it starts anew at every moment: It starts with “Anna Calls From The Arctic”, a kind of film soundtrack with stomping horses, loses itself in style considerations to Tom Verlain’s string bending (“Driver’s Story”) and does Make way for a darkly threatening funk track with prog rock guitars called “Hot Penny Day”. Uncomfortable and poisonous and attractive at the same time – dry cleaning have done everything right. Finally, a buy recommendation by Florence Shaw, which sounds like this: “I’m bored but I get a kick out of buying things” (“No Decent Shoes For Rain”).
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