Review: Secret Love by Dry Cleaning
If I wrote this review in the style of Dry Cleaning’s latest album, Secret Love, it would be very dry, persistently sardonic, and ultimately, a very draining read. You’d read the first paragraph and decide to stop reading because you know the rest of the review isn’t going to vary much. You’d have got the gist from the get-go, no matter how much I tried to elaborate and claim that my writing really is worth reading, just waiting for the good bit that never arrives.
One of many bands who sprung to prominence this decade with a quirky slant on post-punk, Dry Cleaning could be compared to similar acts, such as Black Country New Road and Squid. But where bands like Squid made themselves stand out through making their music dissonant and aggressive, Dry Cleaning’s approach was comparatively tamer, just having vocalist Florence Shaw talk over all the songs. That means Dry Cleaning is easier to listen to, sure, but it also means the band more often than not comes off like the backing track to Shaw’s poems, which wields far fewer fascinating results. It also requires the poems to be great on their own.
This is clear on their third album, Secret Love, released earlier this month. You’d think from the cover that this would be a challenging listen. The album cover (depicting a young woman having some unknown liquid poured into her eye) makes me recoil slightly. But you’d be wrong.
The album impressively sticks to one main mood throughout: apathy. Sure, the lyrics might touch on personal issues like in “Let Me Grow and You’ll See the Fruit”, which discusses loneliness through the imagery of sitting at home and watching TV whilst the world moves on without you, but Shaw is such an uncharismatic singer that I feel nothing when listening. Sometimes her vocals blend in with the instrumentation, and you can go a whole song without realising there were lyrics.
It’s not like Shaw needs to stand out like a sore thumb for her lyrics to have any meaning, but it would help on some tracks like “I Need You”. This is a song about yearning for someone who will give them meaning in life, and yet both Shaw and the band sound flat, almost emotionless. To be fair, including a metaphor about The Apprentice doesn’t help either.
And it’s a shame the music sounds so boring and lifeless, because there are occasional flickers of melody which stood out to me. “Evil Evil Lover” has a nice bassline which reminds me of classic post-punk bands like Joy Division, and the occasional jabs of driving guitar are a nice touch. But the song plays it way too safe and ends up being very unsatisfying. Shaw singing about burnt food doesn’t help either; I assume when she says “There have been malicious studies/That discredited heavily carbonised foods as carcinogenic/But it didn’t put me off,” it’s meant to be a metaphor for how people make bad decisions despite knowing the consequences. But she’s so deadpan when saying it that I’d totally believe that I’m meant to take it literally.
I think my thoughts on the album are best summarised by the bookending tracks. The opener “Hit My Head All Day” has a nice groovy bassline, a nervy atmosphere, and Shaw’s breathy vocals work well for the song. But it did not need to be six minutes long; two was enough . The closer “Joy” has some nice jangly guitars, but the almost generic lyrics about having to remain hopeful—“We’ll build a cute harmless world/Don’t want one from you, cult”—are almost off-putting. And then the song, and by extension, the album, just ends. And I knew this was the last track, and I still thought that surely something must be coming next.
I’ve seen people compare Dry Cleaning to bands like Joy Division, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and Wire; all three of those bands are truly innovative post-punk bands who built the genre with their novel ideas and stark soundscapes. Dry Cleaning are far from one of those bands right now. They make music for supermarkets and poetry for hipster coffee shops, whilst believing they belong in the Tate Modern. Unintentionally great study music.
