DRY CLEANING – SECRET LOVE: REVIEW

DRY CLEANING

Secret Love (4AD/Remote Control)

CHOOSING WELSH ARTIST Cate Le Bon to produce their third album was one of the smart decisions made by Londoners, Dry Cleaning. And it’s not because she has transformed their sound or their thinking or their approach; it’s both more obvious and less straightforward than that.

Firstly, it’s a fool’s errand from the outside to seek to explain where a band and producer and their aspirations separate when it comes to arrangement choices, structural choices, sonic choices. For example, I suspect one of the reasons the four-piece of guitarist Tom Dowse, singer Florence Shaw, drummer Nick Buxton and bassist Lewis Maynard sought out the solo artist-turned-frequent-producer (among her more recent work are jobs with Kurt Vile, Wilco and Horsegirl) is a shared interest in folding the angular into the structured without losing that edge of musical disquiet.

Secondly, Secret Love, an excellent album in so many ways, is in a practical sense a continuation of Dry Cleaning’s direction from album number two, Stumpwork: toning down the more frenetic elements, the punkier bits of their post-punk vigour while still feeling like rough handling is always close; accompanying this with a more relaxed attitude to pop as a colouring agent, not an opposition force which occasionally intrudes; easing Florence Shaw’s spoken delivery into a few more singing modes, her voice irregular but not difficult to listen to, and her confidence growing; extending dance further into fluid movement and not merely jerking response; and becoming slightly less elliptical in Shaw’s lyrics.

This last point remains important in lyrics which exist in a space between absurdist narratives, pointillist detail and non-sequiturs that feel, disturbingly, quite sequitur if you immerse yourself in it. It can’t just be me who feels like I “get it” without necessarily being able to say exactly what “it” is.

The connection, the value for Dry Cleaning in working with Le Bon (whose birth name is Cate Timothy but whose past as a Duran Duran afficionado may be discernible, if not always explicable), is how she wholly understands their preferred territory, or version, of alienation.

It’s true, alienation might be considered a foundational element of post-punk, though really of rock in any of its forms. However, this is not an alienation of disempowerment and resentment that breeds anger-laced butting of heads or kicking against the pricks, nor is it the alienation of abandonment of hope, a resigned acceptance that this society is not for you and will never accept you. What Shaw brings is a curiosity that isn’t free of judgement, but doesn’t let that judgement be its sole motivation, accompanied by a sense of humour to match the eye for detail – a combination which posits her, and inevitably us, as observers who might in another time and another world end up as participants, but for now see the clinical and emotional components with equal distance. Or maybe equal disillusionment.

Take the title track, which has a parenthetical subtitle (Concealed In A Drawing Of A Boy) whose Morrissey-likeness and almost desultory rhythm is accompanied by a noticeable glimmer of Marr-like guitar – sometimes bending, but mostly alternating between pretty and almost pastoral and ascending-to-clouds brightness – matched by Shaw’s breathy singing. As she explores how feelings emerge even if repressed and dangerous to show, she itemises (“A fringe with gel/Salt, sugar/Vivid dish cloths”) and specifies (“A real/Secret love concealed”) and deflates (“You start things and then slip away/Like water down the plug hole … Does everybody know he’s a ghost?”).

A bit later in The Cute Things, siblings, twins even, coexist but do not comprehend. “We’re meant to be from the same make/But you confuse me … Sincere things you say make me want to laugh/And not in a good way”. You could easily mistake Dry Cleaning for a Melbourne (via downtown New York) band here: semi-dragging rhythm, high tenor guitars circling, a reclining melody that seems baked in a heat wave, and a general weave of haziness.

It’s not the only time this thought enters my mind, but Cruise Ship Designer reminds us the album’s foundations are very English with its unison chanting from the previously non-singing men (Le Bon’s encouragement?), intersecting raw guitars and bleak atmosphere, while all the time Shaw inhabits a banal but certainly not indifferent dreamer of small dreams who has not realised she is not part of the world she thinks she is creating.

And just for good measure, in the propulsive Rocks, which has a B-52s-meet-The Clash off-kilter energy, the band pull hard in one direction while Shaw seems almost oblivious, “crying doesn’t always mean someone’s sad, laughter doesn’t always mean …”, and the tension encircles. Dry Cleaning showing another one of those people, another one of those bands maybe, in the world but not wholly part of it. I get that.

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