The everyday becomes poetic on this intensely original album of post-punk shape-shifting from the south London foursome.
What I love about New Long Leg is its insistence to look for the finer detail in all that we could miss out on, and to see that there is magic everywhere – even in the most ordinary places.
New Long Leg may not always be positive, but it's more interesting than that, more needling and necessary. It's everything at once, a record that absorbs and spits back the unending noise of the world and asks that you take a second look, every common thing somehow made brand new.
A sonic cigarette hanging off the bottom lip.
Dry Cleaning’s debut album New Long Leg is a masterful and unpretentious ode to the mundane.
Dry Cleaning seem a working-class band, but they are not a political band in that same sense. This concept is mimicked across many post-punk bands past and present, but instead of trying to stay firmly between those politically-charged guardrails they have stepped outside of them and created their own scenic route.
Dry Cleaning bring a refreshing pop sensibility to British rock music, and New Long Leg is a cracking and captivating debut.
The group has been buzzing for a while, and as is too rarely the case, New Long Leg lives up to the hype and builds upon it, imagining a future in which a new crop of bands long to mimic their style.
A record that exists in the gaps of modern life that most other bands skip over, ‘New Long Leg’ sticks its head in your kitchen cupboards, worries about Brexit, waits for the bins to get collected, feels paranoid, gets its leg pissed on in the big Sainsbury’s. Modern life is delightful!
Cerebral, caustic: exhilarating John Parish-produced debut from art-schooled Londoners.
The end result is so unique and detached from current trends that anyone who fails to listen to Dry Cleaning is missing out on something they won’t be getting anywhere else in their musical diet.
А smart foursome me with a working try knowledge of Life Without Buildings and late-period Magazine, Dry Cleaning enlisted John Parish to add extra damp-kitchen murk to their pleasingly grubby debut LP.
As a complete aesthetic statement, the debut album from Dry Cleaning hardly merits contemporaries at all – suffocating, surreal, and exploratory, it takes chances other groups could scarcely envisage.
Like Shaw’s one-liners, and the mundane moments they represent, the songs on New Long Leg become heavy and improbably moving when stacked on top of each other.
There’s a charming purity that runs through ‘New Long Leg’, and a sense that Dry Cleaning wasn’t the product of a masterplan.
New Long Leg delivers on every level, from Shaw’s lyrical attention to detail to the impeccable musicianship that surrounds her. Fulfilling all the promise shown by those early releases not to mention 4AD’s faith in signing them up, Dry Cleaning are the real deal. Potential realized in abundance.
Following their two hype-building EPs ‘Sweet Princess’ and ‘Boundary Road Snacks and Drinks’, the quartet’s debut album sees them wade further into lyrical surrealism and musical experimentation.
They know exactly what they're doing, and the risks they take result in a debut album that brings a fresh energy to post-punk that's equally challenging and rewarding.
On debut album New Long Leg, the south London quartet further exploit that tension by broadening their palette, experimenting with an array of guitar textures, as well as thrillingly tinny drum machines and pointillist basslines, placed prominently in the mix.
The album that emerged is a record of greater confidence and refinement than Dry Cleaning’s two EPs, Sweet Princess and Boundary Road Snacks. Here, triviality and meaning compete to create a compelling portrait of ordinary life, one littered with acerbic wit, intricacy and yawning negative space.
Whether this seems like something that tickles your sweet spot or you would rather stick with music more predictable, there is no doubt it sounds like nothing else.
DRY CLEANING
A Kerry Bog Pony.
Do everything and feel nothing.
Nick Buxton’s drums.
An Oslo bouncy ball.
Working class roots vs. middle class roots.
Tom Dowse’s guitar.
Aldous Harding’s even more eccentric cousin.
Just an emo dead stuff collector, things come to the brain.
Lewis Maynard’s bass.
Authentic vs. post-authentic. Most listeners have lost the ability to tell the difference.
Aldous Harding’s producer, John Parish.
Listeners have lost the ability to tell ... read more
Did Baxter Dury and Kim Gordon have a daughter together?
Sadly Florence Shaw's low energy vocals lack character or soundbite appeal - really feels like you're sitting bored at a beat poetry performance so put some Sonic Youth/The Fall instrumentals on your headphones to try and drown out the endless monologues.
The connection between these vocals and the music supporting them feels loose at best - and I don’t ever get the feeling I'm listening to one of the great wordsmiths of our age ... read more
A week with Dry Cleaning. It’s a fitting name for the band with their analogies of the repetitive nature of mundane normal life assessments that are offered throughout ‘New Long Leg’ – Yabba! The album is packed with quotable lines involving a dentist with a messy garden, patting Dad on the head, Yabba, No you are, and the worst task of all – cleaning the fat out of the grill pan. I have started this album many times and gone ‘it’s not for me’, ... read more
68 > 77
Whilst the execution isn't perfect, I think Dry Cleaning fell on a really cool formula here. The observable impact this has had on UK Post-Punk in recent years has only reinforced this belief. There are moments where it really works, but the homogeneous sound of the album as a whole stops me raising the score too much
Best: Scratchcard Lanyard, Unsmart Lady, More Big Birds
Worst: Her Hippo
1 | Scratchcard Lanyard 4:06 | 89 |
2 | Unsmart Lady 3:02 | 80 |
3 | Strong Feelings 4:04 | 82 |
4 | Leafy 3:08 | 80 |
5 | Her Hippo 4:38 | 84 |
6 | New Long Leg 4:12 | 80 |
7 | John Wick 3:26 | 76 |
8 | More Big Birds 4:07 | 78 |
9 | A.L.C 3:09 | 74 |
10 | Every Day Carry 7:38 | 79 |
#1 | / | Far Out Magazine |
#1 | / | Rough Trade (UK) |
#1 | / | The Atlantic |
#2 | / | Sound Opinions: Jim DeRogatis |
#3 | / | DIY |
#3 | / | No Ripcord |
#4 | / | musicOMH |
#4 | / | The Skinny |
#4 | / | Under the Radar |
#5 | / | Piccadilly Records |