This week, Live4ever is shining the spotlight on some of our favourite albums and tracks of 2021 so far – today’s highlight comes from Dry Cleaning.
Dry Cleaning are a band whose origins are fully woven into the fabric of their music.
The jamming style of Tom Dowse, bassist Lewis Maynard and drummer Nick Buxton, borne of their instrumentalists days, together with the sharply observed, whimsically delivered prose of Florence Shaw are the two sides to the Dry Cleaning coin which have been delivering stand-out EPs since 2019 and which in March brought one of 2021’s essential debut albums.
“As Shaw and her compatriots cycle through a series of never less than intriguing guises, her non-sequiturs skew from worn carpet mundanity to the near psychotic,” our review reads.
“At the same time the musicians (although there’s never an obvious gulf between roles) are charged with casting the tension into shapes, sometimes accommodating – A.L.C, Leafy’s masterclass in understatement – while Her Hippo and closer Every Day Carry are quite different rooms of the same house, the latter eventually stuttering to a jagged punk-ish climax whilst Shaw asks rhetorically, ‘What’s the point?…I’m so full of poisonous rage’.”
Click here for more of Live4ever’s top picks of the year so far