I’ve started reserving special listening times for Dry Cleaning. There are times when the deadpan sprechgesang vocals of Florence Shaw just don’t do anything for me, but when I’m looking to zone out, I can appreciate the vibe. But on the latest album, Secret Love, Shaw has started singing—or at least, her voice now does this thing where it occasionally remembers that vocal melodies exist, like someone waking up mid-dream and deciding to stay there. She attempted this on Stumpwork, but it’s an even stranger vibe on Secret Love‘s opener “Hit My Head All Day,” and she occasionally falsettos in the track “Secret Love (Concealed in a Drawing of a Boy).”
Now there are these moments where her voice curves upward, finds a note, and holds it, as the band really freaks out; angular guitar lines, driving bass, and drunken drum crashes. Shaw popping in for a small vocal line is like watching someone shrug in slow motion. Another way to think of it, her vocal still sounds like she’s reading fragments from a diary she found in a charity shop—detached, bemused, faintly ironic—but now occasionally she’ll land on something else.
The album exists in that uncanny space between speaking and singing, between caring and not caring, between the banal and the profound. It may be their most accessible to listeners new to the Dry Cleaning world. Shaw’s voice—now occasionally, tentatively melodic—makes the whole thing feel like reality tilting slightly sideways. Post-punk is learning to hum.
