Dry Cleaning: The first band to truly address the social media age?
For reference, I am about to take out my phone and recite the first three Tweets in my feed at random: 1. “Replace a word in a song title with Pat Butcher.” 2. “Hey YouTube, maybe don’t put ads before first aid vids? I don’t have time to watch a Red Lobster ad when my grandma is choking on a fish bone.” 3. “Watch: The moment we tried to get a comment from Stephen Bear as he went into court for sentencing. He was jailed for 21 months for sharing a sex video online without consent.”
Now, here are the lyrics to the first verse of Dry Cleaning’s epic track ‘More Big Birds’: “Brain replaced by something / With only the side of my nose for company / These and those and them ones / What’d you call it? It’ll come to me / Brain replaced by something.” It might not be close enough to call uncanny, but it’s the sort of thing that strikes you as apparent when you spend your days trying to avoid simply saying, ‘That’s a great, edgy song’ for a living.
Thankfully, Dry Cleaning is a band that actively avoids cliches and as such, you’re far from left to wallow in typical fodder like ‘they offer jangly indie guitars reminiscent of x’. But what these oddballs serve up is not mindless garbling that actively aims to swerve the typical cannon of musical accreditation either—their output is, in fact, perhaps the most accurate representation of the zeitgeist in music today. Whether they are aware of it or not, they skewered Mark Zuckerberg’s bequest on the end of a postmodernist post-punk spear.
Florence Shaw might indeed utter it with a blasé sense of absurdity, but our brains have, indeed, been replaced by something: a random barrage of inconsequential nothingness that sedates and disengages us until that now everyday moment arrives whereby you suddenly snap out of the scrawl and say, ‘I am wasting my life’. It might sound dramatic but it’s true. Social media is a realm of diminishing returns right down to the scientific level—the initial exciting hit you get from the hilarity / triggering / sad / shocking / intriguing first nugget on your feed is steadily nullified as the dopamine response dwindles and your left trawling through the ocean without anything to bate your rod.
In Dry Cleaning’s music, that is the moment that Shaw puts aside her feed of random lyrics, and the reality zap of a scything guitar flutter from Tom Dowse shakes things back up. As a band, it is an angular and odd sound that they serve, with rolling poetic melodies hidden beneath a hectic surface—once again akin to our coherent yet chaotic modern lifestyles.
And therein lies one of the beautiful elements that make this band an amazing modern entity; we’ve had artists using absurdism to reflect the times throughout history, alá Daniil Kharms in the Soviet Union days and Marcel Duchamp’s daft toilet in World War I, but Shaw’s is somehow oddly relatable (or rather knowable, if you will) in the present without any postscript explanation.
“I’ve been thinking about eating that hotdog for hours,” is not a normal thing to place in a jazzed-up pop song, but where does anything go these days? And I’ll be damned if beyond that, the line doesn’t bring up that feeling of seeing some food porn on Instagram and desperately trying to suppress the takeaway urge for the rest of the day. These little knowable corroborations from her snippets of acerbic absurdity are a refreshing lyrical facet that has never really been deployed before.
For the most part, this is because most people who make art want to say something, Shaw, unpretentiously doesn’t trouble herself with that on the whole. If it’s important – like policemen continually killing or assaulting women – then she’ll mention it, but as for everything else, she’s happy to mumble away with comic titbits. In fact, even her unpronounced talking style amid the wild rally of instrumentation is indicative of our age where the blaring blur of content renders trying to shout a point above it all a daft impossibility.
Dry Cleaning’s two records and an EP to date have essentially unleashed an anthology of cascading consciousness that proves to be the densest collection of poetic atoms since Philip Larkin dipped his spam javelin in a tungsten fleshlight behind a library in Hull as a particularly heavy high-pressure front moved in from Europe. It’s a wallop of wicked wordery and stunning singular arrangements that captures anything and everything in this modern croc of gold.
Dry Cleaning’s musical newsfeed has paired every passing thought of their reluctant ‘singer‘: from idle observations about the new formatting of The Antiques Roadshow with almost covertly candid quips of poignancy about relationships, longing, loss, isolation and shoe discomfort. In the process, it transfigures some of the banalest things ever uttered in music into peculiar strokes of originality that illuminate the world in a neon introspective hue.
In ‘Kwenchy Kups’ they even seem to enact a text conversation in song, it doesn’t get much more postmodern than that. While the band themselves might read all this and think, ‘Well, there’s merely a morsel of truth to that garbage, provided the morsel belonged to a pygmy shrew that wasn’t particularly hungry’, I personally don’t care, because as someone who writes about music all day, it is unbelievably refreshing for a band to offer up something so singular and peculiar yet knowable and enthusing that you are even moved to waffle like this at all. In short, whether it’s absurdist baloney or pioneering futurism, it’s a whole lotta fucking fun.
