Dry Cleaning - New Long Leg

One of the very few - perhaps the only? - 'big' (and/or) 'new' British bands we care about here. And for very good reason. The same things that got me wrapped up in Life Without Buildings, early Arab Strap, Yeah Yeah Noh, even The Fall are calling my name here, though it's a stretch to really suggest Dry Cleaning sound much like those bands. It's a spirit thing. Or an ingenuity thing. The spirit of ingenuity/the ingenuity of spirit! The band (the instrument-playing side of it, that is), a fantastic trio of musicians with a connection their adult-lives long, sound bigger, beefier, more 'rock' less 'new wave' as on the preceding EPs, though it's impossible for me to think about Dry Cleaning without having vocalist Florence Shaw appear front and centre in my thoughts. Having never been in a band before, Shaw performs with a thrilling art-bent DIY sensibility, her mostly spoken word delivery a mix of Dada absurdism and modern-life-is-hell observationalism. She is both clever and funny, without seeming to be overtly or purposefully either, which is basically the only way anyone should be clever and funny when making music. The best thing is, you don't need me telling you any of this. Turn on the radio at any given time, you'll hear them. I've seen this mob on the TV at least once, and it wont be the last time. I can't consider that anything other than victory, multifarious victories in fact, against anti-intellectualism, the unimaginative, the pious (all of which there's far too much of to count right now). Finally, something popular worth standing behind. Don't underestimate how much that's needed.