Dry Cleansing – Stumpwork
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“Nothing works. The whole lot’s costly. Issues are shit. However they’re going to be OK.” No, it’s not our new Prime Minister’s handle to the nation (although it may very well be). It’s Florence Shaw on Dry Cleansing’s sensible second album Stumpwork.
9/10
Are you a type of individuals who eavesdrops on strangers’ conversations? Do you pay attention to the bus, within the pub, on the grocery store? Do you tune in to these overheard snatches of chatter? Do they lodge in your thoughts and depart you questioning, days later, what on earth these individuals had been speaking about?
I do know I do. So does Florence Shaw.
For years she used to make notes of them on her telephone, creating a group of unconnected feedback that caught her ear. Then, when she joined a band, she learn them out over the music they have been making. And lo, it got here to go that Dry Cleansing had hit on one thing particular.
You in all probability heard it first on Scratchcard Lanyard, their sensible breakout lockdown tune. You’ll have investigated additional once they launched an album with a title New Lengthy Leg symptomatic of these unusual anomalous feedback that sound surreal when plucked out of context.
There’s extra of it on their new album. And it’s even higher.
Stumpwork is one other baffling title: “A kind of embroidery in style within the seventeenth century, consisting of intricate, vibrant designs padded with horsehair to make them stand out in aid,” says my dictionary. The duvet artwork affords a recent instance, albeit a tasteless one: a pink bar of cleaning soap with the title spelt out in intricate lettering created from… is it horsehair? Human hair? Let’s not take into consideration what else it may be.
Musically, with John Parish as soon as once more within the manufacturing chair, Stumpwork elaborates on the postpunk template established by Tom Dowse (guitar), Lewis Maynard (bass) and Nick Buxton (keyboards), creating every thing from typical tunes with a cool undercurrent to jangly indie melodies and dissonant soundscapes constructed round digital noise and avant jazz. Plus the occasional sax. And, on one monitor, what seems like a flugelhorn.
As for the singing… properly, there’s no singing. Singing is so final decade. Speaking is the place we’re at. Sprechgesang, if you wish to get technical (and we do). Everybody’s at it today – Self Esteem, Moist Leg, Squid, Black Nation New Street – reciting and/or narrating their lyrics. Shaw delivers them with aplomb; her phrases land like little linguistic bombs. Once they explode the feeling is pure pleasure, usually with an undercurrent of laughter.
Shaw dislikes the time period ‘deadpan’ and rightly so, because it suggests she places no feeling into her phrases, however she does ship them in a languid, laconic model that implies intimacy, as if she’s simply chatting to a buddy on the telephone (the primary monitor is predicated on an precise telephone dialog) relatively than addressing a dwell viewers or recording them in a studio.
A lot of the lyrics come from Shaw’s observations whereas strolling round London and Bristol, making them extra straight autobiographical than earlier than, when she was extra more likely to incorporate discovered fragments into her lyrics. “I wrote concerning the issues that preoccupied me over this era, like loss, masculinity, feminism, my mum, being separated from my associate for little stretches within the lockdown, lust,” she explains.
From these preoccupations, wider political and social commentary emerges. “I believe in the event you make one thing observational, which I believe I do, it’s political,” she provides. “There have been two murders of girls in London that have been extensively lined on the information, and the precise particulars of a type of murders have been reported on whereas we have been recording at Rockfield. That protection influenced a few of my writing and my mind-set.”
The band’s instrumentation, too, was influenced by our more and more bleak socio-political panorama, in addition to by grief from the lack of a number of liked members of the family. Consequently, at occasions the music throbs with intense and pressing momentum, whereas at others it zones out into icy detachment. “I do suppose these items seep into the music, even when unconsciously,” says Dowse, “and absolutely nobody can ignore the severity of the degradation we’ve witnessed prior to now few years.” Hear hear.
But for all the intense undertones within the songs, it’s the humour you keep in mind. Shaw has a present for dropping in a non sequitur when it’s least anticipated: one tune ends, abruptly, with the phrases: “Stiff undergarment.” If you happen to’re solely half-listening, you may be so startled that you simply chortle out loud.
As if to remind us that that is, basically, pop music, and that some conventions must be revered, she generally throws in typical tune lyrics – “Doo-doo-doo-doo” / “Shoop-shoop” / “La-la-la” / “Ooh-ooh” – however solely as an ironic apart. At different occasions she writes them into the tune like a memo to self. “No la-la-las in the beginning / Change with Oohs,” she reminds herself in Driver’s Story, delivering the phrases in probably the most sarcastic tone potential over a warped guitar riff. It sounds concurrently like a lyrical work in progress and a overview: “Tough first half / Love second half… I’m not mad eager on it / Not a stand out for me.”
The title monitor Stumpwork does the identical factor musically, all of the sudden opening up with a burst of melody earlier than seemingly discarding the thought of a simple tune as Shaw strikes swiftly on into one other surreal non sequitur: “Doo-doo-doo doo-doo. No matter. Woah, simply killed an enormous wolf!”
The opening quantity, Anna Calls From The Arctic, includes a sparse digital rhythm, swirling synthesisers and occasional sax. “Ought to I suggest friendship?” she inquires of the distant buddy who actually did name to inform her about her new job within the Arctic. Shaw sums up her findings concerning the place: “It’s both scientists / Or people who find themselves mining / Or canine sledge individuals.” The non sequiturs, once they arrive, are jarring and hilarious and mirror the form of scattered method we predict, even when we don’t all say it out loud like this: “Nothing works / The whole lot’s costly / And opaque and privatised / My shoe organising factor arrived / Thank God.”
Guitars jangle like early R.E.M. on Kwenchy Kups, which affords an optimistic outlook on the state of issues proper now: “Issues are shit / However they’re gonna be OK.” Then it shifts gear fully, turning right into a story a few go to to the zoo. However not an excellent zoo: “I’m going to see the otter / There aren’t any otters… I’m going to see the water caterpillar / There’s no such factor.”
The closest Dry Cleansing come to a traditional tune, and the closest Shaw comes to standard singing, is on Gary Ashby, a tune constructed round a Johnny Marr-like guitar jangle, on which she tells the poignant story of an escaped household pet – it seems that the titular Gary Ashby is a tortoise who has gone lacking.
On an album that stretches into all kinds of fascinating areas musically, there’s a funk undercurrent to Scorching Penny Day, alongside squelchy beats and distorted electrical guitars, behind a narrative Shaw concocted after strolling round a flea market. As soon as once more it sounds extra like a memo to self than a completely fledged tune: “I’m not right here to supply clean / They will fucking present clean,” she pronounces.
Generally the lyrics sound like real overheard feedback – “I see male violence in every single place” – and at others inquiries to herself as she goes concerning the technical enterprise of recording them in a studio: “Are these uncovered wires all good? Close to the steam?” It ends on maybe the oddest non sequitur of the lot, like one thing from Bowie’s cut-up lyric method: “Generally I really feel like I’m only a loner and that’s that / Stiff undergarment.”
Musically, the album is at its most fascinating when it’s at its weirdest. No Respectable Sneakers For Rain is constructed round a fragile guitar motif and will get stranger as its lyrics get stranger: “Who’re you? / That’s proper, you’re from the Seventies… Fry an egg on my bonnet.” Liberty Logs is even weirder, its sluggish, skronky avant-jazz fragments fracturing into digital abstraction. “Bizarre premise,” says Shaw, as if acknowledging the music itself. “If you happen to like this you’ll like / Bizarre bizarre bizarre bizarre.” After which she’s distracted once more, as we so usually are: “I’ll threat sluggish loss of life for Chinese language spring roll… Large, rotten soccer / The place is the hospital?”
Don’t Press Me comes closest to a traditional indie-rock tune, options some precise singing, and boasts one of many extra memorable traces – “Don’t contact my gaming mouse / You rat” – whereas Conservative Hell is unquestionably the primary tune in music historical past to say sumptuary legal guidelines (look ‘em up – I did) earlier than addressing one other buddy within the form of style favoured by Sally Rooney in her e mail exchanges. “I needed to thanks for organising the Edinburgh journey,” Shaw pronounces in surprisingly easy style, “Which, aside from what occurred to my Kindle, was superb.”
So there it’s. You may take Stumpwork as a state of the nation report on 2022, a 12 months that may absolutely go down as one of many worst, and most troublesome, in all our lives. But it surely’s additionally optimistic, as that line from Kwenchy Cups assures us: “Issues are shit, however they’re gonna be OK.”
All phrases by Tim Cooper. Yow will discover extra of Tim’s writing at his Louder Than Struggle creator’s archive and at Muck Rack. He’s additionally Twitter as @TimCooperES and posts each day at EatsDrinksAndLeaves.
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