Dry Cleaning - New Long Leg

First, a personal caveat. Calling yourself Dry Cleaning is no way to endear yourselves to me. Yes, I understand why bands do things like this, zeroing in on the ordinary, the mundane, as a way to highlight the extraordinary, the innate complexities, layers and depth and beauties they plan to focus on. I wish they wouldn't. I have enough of the ordinary in my life. I look to music for something else.

Having got that off my chest, here are some words on 4AD's great new hopes. Yes, a four-piece band from South London called Dry Cleaning and their debut album called New Long Leg just out.

It's very much a record of the streets. It's real in the way that Tracey Emin was real. You just need to listen to it and gives off the smells of city life, of traffic streaming by, of rubbish bins and fish and chips, of Staines and Crystal Palace, concrete and high rise, convenience stores. Laaandon!!!

So, if I've already mentioned that the name of Dry Cleaning does little for me and the textures of their record is not one that particularly floats my boat either, that's not to say New Long Leg is not a record of merit or worth. It is. For many people it will be one of the records of the year and I can understand why.

Here is a band that do that Post Punk thing that is so prevalent right now.They tick absolutely all of the necessary boxes very competently. Stream of consciousness lyrics, intoned, (in this case genererally spoken), over scratchy, wall of sound guitars that go back most of all to Gang of Four. Modern disquiet. It's almost a formula now and bands are lining up around the block with their take on it. Count 'em - IDLES Shame, Cool Greenhouse, the Fat White Family family tree. Get in line Dry Cleaning. Get in line. Get your contemporary irony, disdain and despair here. In a State of the Art 4AD sleeve.

New Long Leg establishes its rhythm early and sticks with it for the rest of the record. Like a long Geoffrey Boycott innings. There's actually very little variation on here. If you don't care for one song then you're highly unlikely to care for the next. I wonder sometimes whether this is easy or uneasy listening really. It's certainly in vogue. You have to give it that.

Ultimately I'll pass. This isn't a bad record and Dry Cleaning aren't a bad band. They're just a rather predictable one. I'd point them in the direction of Goat Girl, the one band from that Brixton, Windmill scene that is so clearly the spiritual home of this sound, who seem to have struck off for somewhere new with their second album On All Fours.

Dry Cleaning are not there yet. New Long Leg is their first record and it's certainly not their New Gold Dream. But Simple Minds took a while to get themselves completely off the building sites of Glasgow and onto the broad cinema screens and autobahns of Europe. Dry Cleaning need to find a way of making the ordinary sound extraordinary. This is not the record of theirs that does so.