Dry Cleaning

also milo z thanks for the Lithics mentions, I've had a blast getting into their catalogue

"Gary Ashby" is seemingly a tortoise, no?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdvrSu38pWY

just got tickets for their february nyc show

New single/video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyfYFznhyJI

No great surprises but a nice Reynolds piece: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/14/arts/music/dry-cleaning-stumpwork.html

Wearing a long black lace skirt and a sparkly gold camisole, she curled her fingers around the mic stand like the stem of a wineglass

yes

loving "stumpwork" so far. it's only a slight shift from "new long leg" (she sings a very tiny bit! there's more acoustic guitar) but that's OK with me. i would turn the vocals down a hair in the mix if i could

This is fantastic isn't it? A clear step up

The vocals are absurdly high in the mix. It actually does my head in.

I’m not feeling this, the separation of the vocals makes them feel too disconnected and it’s missing the counterpoint between high energy music and lackadaisical vocal word. Feels kind of plodding overall.

I'm still trying to assimilate the early-released tracks into the context of the album (super irritating strategy to me) but I sure wouldn't describe Shaw's vocals as lackadaisical. I think the mix is right to foreground her charisma over the less unique sounds of the band, and it adds power to have her insinuating in your ear rather than blending with the band. I'm a little concerned the live show might favour the latter.

Before this thread it really hadn't occurred to me that the vocals were particularly foregrounded. At least not problematically so.

I need to put in some more effort with the 5+ minute tracks but I may end up preferring this to New Long Leg. Feels more varied and I'm totally digging the wonky sax and synth shadings on a bunch of tracks, not least the final three.

droopy flute solo comes here

I’ve come to realise Shaw has the same acerbic, insightful, imitative qualities I love in Laurie Anderson, simultaneous horrified fascination and baffled affection for the culture.

I’ve come to realise Shaw has the same acerbic, insightful, imitative qualities I love in Laurie Anderson, simultaneous horrified fascination and baffled affection for the culture.

Feel like this one is a “grower”. After listening to “Stumpwork” on Friday I immediately listened to “Sweet Princess” again and marveled how great they were straight out of the gate.

The cover grosses me out and somehow makes me want to listen to this less

haha yeah no fucking way would i buy the vinyl

Haha right? Imagine going back and telling Vaughn Oliver that’s what the label would release for a cover in the future.

this is one of his sleeves for Scheer
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a2/Scheer_-_Infliction.jpg
and Pod featured him nude dancing with a belt of dead eels, he would have been totally down with the Stumpwork sleeve.
There’s a limited mirrorboard edition with a silver cover if it helps?

It was a joke based on how 4ad used to be known for a very specific house style, from which this Dry Cleaning cover diverges wildly, but thanks for the “well, actually” lesson anyway.

ok, missed it

the mix doesn't bother me on headphones

i do see the laurie anderson thing, though i feel like anderson's lyrics are more cohesive/thematic than shaw's, which often feel like a string of non sequiters (not a criticism)

It reminds me of the week I spent using the Conet Project CDs as commuting listening in the train, a sense of tuning into the random clutter of unspoken thoughts around us.

Also, jon v c, I frequently feel like the stupidest person in the thread for my banal posts, I’m sorry that one came across as condescending but usually I’m explaining things to myself.

Feels very weird that this is isn't being widely spoken of in the terms of something quite brilliant tbh. Liberty Log alone has single-handedly rescued Anglo post-rock from a decade of torpor

It's more quiet, more unassuming, more humble, and yet contains vastly more galaxies than any number of these Squid types combined. It isn't just the frontwoman, rightly foregrounded. This band's secret weapon is its music. And so the Life Without Buildings comparisons make more sense this time

Listen to that broken, gasping, intermittent, perplexed groove that swells beneath Liberty Log and tell me it isn't marvellous

Feels very weird that this is isn't being widely spoken of in the terms of something quite brilliant tbh. Liberty Log alone has single-handedly rescued Anglo post-rock from a decade of torpor

― imago, Monday, October 24, 2022 8:38 PM (five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i like this band and album, and i know you're just going to do you which is absolutely fine, but i think it should be registered (for probably the millionth time idk) that this kind of baroque meritocratic praise which also just kind of makes things up that aren't even real might actually hinder the band dry cleaning from becoming more widely appreciated afaict.

ppl weren't kidding about how high the vocals are mixed

If anything the lyrics were sometimes hard to discern on the last one for those of us with, ah, attention problems, but they're well foregrounded here.

I'm hoping to hear four of these songs on a KEXP show presented by Cheryl Waters.

i like this way more than the first one, musically it's so much more interesting

yeah, i'm enjoying this album a lot though, unlike LJ, I am finding the back half less compelling.

I knew their guitarist was cool. Did I know he was THIS cool though?

https://worldofechomusic.com/blogs/inner-world/inner-world-027-dry-cleaning

i love the instrumentation and especially the guitar on "No Decent Shoes Fora Rain" so much

i like this way more than the first one, musically it's so much more interesting

this is otm, but also why it's disappointing that the vocals are so high in the mix, keeps pulling me back from the really interesting stuff going on behind her.

they are so loud you could pull them back 25% and they'd still be the loudest thing in the mix by far, i know what you're saying about how it keeps you at arm's length in some way

Not hearing the imbalance, maybe a hair more prominent than NLL but in no way detrimental to the music for me. Parish absolutely knows what he’s doing mixing small bands with charismatic vocals, and the band have talked enthusiastically about his role in bringing ideas to fruition. They’re an excellent band but a genuine 50/50 with Shaw in terms of appeal.

I'm not hearing the imbalance, and, yeah, I like the sax and synth touches on 'Icebergs' and 'Anna Calls From The Arctic.'

I love the bickering in “Kwenchy Kups” too

the vocal mix i think is what sets this record apart. this band did not click for me really at all until this album

Obviously what one thinks about the mix or how successful one finds it as an intentional choice is one thing, but I can't see how you wouldn't notice that Florence's vocals are much louder in the mix than anything else. I've listened to it on headphones via my iPhone rip, the original CD in my car and the original CD on my home setup and it feels immediately obvious to me.

I feel like she's definitely floating 'above' the music on the opener, but that's been around for months and I've revisited it infrequently since the rest of the LP dropped. That track doesn't feel particularly representative and it just didn't occur to me elsewhere, presumably precisely because it didn't detract from the experience. I mean, it's not as though there is a definitively 'correct' way of mixing. (Or is there lol?)

People IRL have made exactly the same observation so I'm prepared to believe it's palpably... atypical.

I've ended up listening to it again now dammit. Updated opinion: definitely better than NLL.

I listen to this band to hear inventive guitar music roiling around Shaw's quietly intense thought process, the mix delivers. I don't need them to sound like other bands.

Totes.

Also: one of my odder hobbies is watching how bands' sets evolve over time, despite rarely managing to attend stuff. https://www.setlist.fm/setlist/dry-cleaning/2022/pryzm-kingston-upon-thames-england-5bbe9398.html

Whoops! Premature submission. I was going to note that their sets tend to be fairly static and that they introduced the bulk of Stumpwork only in the last couple of weeks. BUT it came at the expense of "Viking Hair", leaving only "Meghan" from 2019. This is a major tragedy lol.

rats, I like "Viking Hair"

fwiw, my annoyance with the mix doesn't mean I don't like this, I really do. It's even better than the debut! I just wish the vocals didn't kinda overwhelm everything else at times.

I like it as much as the others. My favorites: the title track," "Hit My Head All Day," "Evil Evil Idiot, "Let Me Grow and You'll See the Fruit."

xp That’s interesting, I find this album the most ear-wormy and melodic of their work

Likewise

"evil evil idiot" is truly an anthem for our times

where it may have emanated from, though I’m not even sure of that and don’t really care to know more about that uninteresting music ‘scene’

Also, you could just not write anything you dolt.

Hehe. I couldn't see, in a quick scan of setlists.com at least, that Dry Cleaning had appeared at the venue in question. Maybe it's become like 'Canterbury prog' inside some listener's heads, more a sound than a strict geographical thing. In this case bands with guitars and vaguely sprechgesang-ish elements or something.

"windmill scene" is indeed a music reviewer brain-worm that may have once had a bit of sense to it, but is now pretty much as meaningless as "indie sleaze"

I like how people have vastly different takes on how loud/quiet the vocals are. I assume that's because there's no broadly established standard for how this kind of vocal should sit in a mix. Obviously I like where they've landed with this, maybe especially on headphones: you get an effect where it feels like there's a rock band in front of you while Florence is speaking from within your head, like an inner monologue. (In part because, mixing-wise, they keep a lot of the lower proximity-effect frequencies of her voice and let the guitar dominate the more present band right above that!) I can imagine that being claustrophobic for some listeners, but I think it's much better than if they tried to push her voice back into some kind of stage arrangement.

About RYM ... I have not spent much time there but I feel like it's often home to a thing that bugs me, which is people (dudes) who follow indie music but have profoundly negative or threatened reactions to acts they perceive as too arty or pretentious or trying to do something weird or "hip," and feel a need to punish or discourage such stuff. This is not a new habit, and my reaction when I encountered it used to be, like, if you just want decent songs and nobody trying annoying pretentious stuff, why are you listening to indie rock, just listen to more mainstream pop-rock. But over the past few decades "more mainstream pop-rock" has gradually disappeared as a genre category and basically dropped its audience into the "indie" pool, so ... I think you get a lot of people who are following this media space while being constantly frustrated by praise for stuff they were never going to dig, because there was never a good lane reserved for those whose tastes revolved around the more popular/crossover rock bands. (By which I mean, over the years, maybe White Stripes or Arctic Monkeys or now Geese.) Maybe that's a rude or stereotyping accusation, but I don't mean it in a bad way — it's just a function of where people talk! — and at least a couple of the bad reactions on RYM remind me of it.

- nods head throughout post -

Well observed on the mixing too - maybe for some the intimacy on the voice registers as “loud”

I have to admit their aesthetic is definitely part of the appeal for me. When I first heard them I figured they looked like Elastica or Savages or something, so I was pretty delighted to see that they basically look like four people who would never be in a band together. Like the guitarist is hardcore, the bassist is a metalhead, the drummer is indie rock, and then Florence is just standing out front with long hair and dresses making funny faces.

New one-off track, I guess:

https://drycleaning.bandcamp.com/album/sliced-by-a-fingernail

And it’s a wonder

Whoa. Freaky.

Incidentally I notice they're coming further south this time around (June), matttkkkk!

Yeah last show of the tour in old Slowbart, part of the Dark Mofo festival. I’ve cooled a little on the album but will go if I can get a ticket - went to Melbourne for their last visit so this is a bit easier!

anybody seen the US tour so far? I’m seeing them tonight in DC. more people here than the last time I saw them but disappointingly not a LOT more

I was there last night at Howard Theatre but missed their earlier dc appearance for some reason. It got crowded I thought but yeah not sold out packed . As a concert goer I was good with that , although maybe the bands made less $.

i wish the tshirts were less ugly

anyway good show if a little less revelatory than the last time I saw them. the opening band was meh.

maybe it's time for men to clean for like 500 years

this album is so great

I see their live sets are fairly generously proportioned lately, seemingly incorporating *all* of Secret Love!?!

I put the record aside for a few months after the initial flurry of familiarisation. It sounds pretty consistently fab today.

yeah they play it all but not in order and with other songs interspersed

Yeah that ruled:

https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:kqdyhnklmmv34nmml6btyqv6/bafkreigecfym2rnxxobpcalmkk3sismbhx56meadrdu2qytk2uusvumyve

what is that background? wasn’t at the Washington show

It's pretty much what you see! A squashed Zoom call and that note.

I wonder if they’ve had an actual cruise ship designer in the audiences