"Stumpwork": Dry Cleaning's new studio album

Dry Cleaning. A two-word, high concept band with immense originality and intelligence? What, on earth, would there be not to like? The gaunt spikes of post-punk led by Tom Dowse’s metallic guitar with Florence Shaw’s monotone poetry chanted over the top was immediately appealing, hence the rapturous response to their debut album, New Long Leg, released last year.

Stumpwork seems to have arrived with almost indecent haste. Second albums, as is well documented, are funny old things - do something different and get accused of golden goose slaying; repeat the formula and be blamed for playing safe. Yes, Stumpwork is New Long Leg part two, but a gloriously developed, evolving one. No matter how wonderful the playing is - and the standard is high throughout, the anchor of Lewis Maynard and Nick Buxton allowing Dowse to riff and invent freely - it is all about Shaw. It is almost like listening to a hypnotherapy tape: her lyrical vignettes, so often swamped in the live mix, are here again captured clearly by PJ Harvey cohort John Parish.

Stumpwork’s mixture of the facile and the fathomless is beguiling; as a snapshot of a country and political system in decay, it dwells on meaningless consumerism: “Nothing works, everything’s expensive and opaque and privatized/ My shoe organizing thing arrived, thank God” (Anna Calls From The Arctic); “I’m bored but I get a kick out of buying things” (No Decent Shoes For Rain); “If I could live across the road from a boot fair, wouldn’t that be something?” (Hot Penny Day). The government (Conservative Hell), otters (Kwenchy Kups), and a family tortoise (Gary Ashby) also come under scrutiny.

Dowse’s overdriven guitar on Hot Penny Day and the seven-minute groove of Liberty Log demonstrate that there is plenty of scope for the group to survive their current flavour of the month-ness. “I don’t want to go on about it, but we’re back in business,” Shaw says on album opener Anna Calls From The Arctic. Stumpwork demonstrates that the Dry Cleaning business is going from strength to strength.