If you use a notes app for more than just passwords and grocery lists, it quickly becomes a chaotic archive of dream interpretations, draft texts, and years-old epiphanies. Florence Shaw, vocalist of post-punk quartet Dry Cleaning, turns those notes into lyrics about finding connection in an apathetic world. On the band’s new EP Boundary Road Snacks and Drinks, Shaw picks up where August’s Sweet Princess EP left off, confronting loneliness and desire through lists and non sequiturs. She comments on duvet covers, an abandoned fridge, hot people, a banana. Spread across six tracks, these observations represent more than just banal references to personal history. They track a practice of looking, one that places the everyday under a microscope to find out what lies within.
“Do you believe that hard work is what it takes to be successful?” Shaw asks on opener “Dog Proposal,” and without lingering, opines: “Hard work has very little to do with success.” The line acts as an overture, inverting one contemporary western belief in preparation for a larger attempt to expose the absurdity of the most trivial aspects of modern life. Repeating the lyric, “I’ve joined a gym, I’ve joined a gym close to the office,” Shaw creates a loop of professional small talk that turns meaningless conversation into a critique of itself.
Shaw never sounds removed from the behaviors she observes. “Stream, stream, stream my favorite shows/Just tell me who dies and who finds love,” she sings on “Spoils,” as if watching with glassy eyes. She portrays herself as stuck, not unhappily, in a life of monotonous routine, attached but disinterested at the same time. She dissects her own emotional states with equal coolness. In the latter half of “Viking Hair,” she asks a lover: “Stick up for me/Do what you’re told but sometimes tell me what to do as well/I just want to sexually experiment on a nice safe pair of hands/Don’t judge me, just hold still.” The relentless push of electric guitar and drums lends her words both a sense of confidence and the surreality of a film soundtrack.
Shaw’s habit of poking fun of the life she leads, yet leading it nonetheless, loses its humor on the aptly titled “Sombre One.” Over ascending and descending notes on electric guitar, she delivers lines detached from narrative in a slow, heavy monotone. She repeats phrases, telling herself that “everything is easy to get out and put back quickly” as if seeking consolation in the pages of an instruction manual. Reciting a to-do list, she whispers, “Don’t get burnt by the sun’s rays.” Against spare guitar and a dull drumbeat, the line feels pregnant with self-reproach, as if Shaw is ashamed to remind herself to do so little.
“Sombre One” imbues jagged, stream-of-consciousness lyrics with melancholy, and it almost falters under the weight of its own self-seriousness. But before the song ends, the instruments fade away, and Shaw’s voice is heard from a distance, delivering a mix of lyrics from other songs like spoken-word poems. It’s a self-reflexive moment for the band, one that turns their signature re-purposing of phrases (“Rest in heavenly peace,” “Amazing voice, amazing body”) back on themselves. By treating language as a machine to be taken apart, Dry Cleaning crystallize experience with just a few images and turns of phrase. It’s enough to make you sift through the minutiae of your own life in search of meanings you’ve overlooked.
