#5 - Dry Cleaning - “Scratchcard Lanyard”

Dec 20, 2021

When I went home to California after I graduated college in May, Dry Cleaning’s New Long Leg was the only album my parents wanted to play in the car. It became a household meme. “Dry Cleaning, again?” I sighed, more than once. But “Scratchcard Lanyard” slowly burned itself into my brain, like a cradle lullaby you never forget. I had already listened to the album and enjoyed it prior to returning home, but this constant repetition, combined with the raw-feels of being home again (maybe for the last time in a while) injected the music with new emotion. Plus, the music synced surprisingly well with the experience of riding through LA freeways: the band’s lean, insistent playstyle and Florence Shaw’s deadpan vocals seemed to fit perfectly with the sensation of speeding along narrow, colorless strips and flat, dry landscapes. When I listen to “Scratchcard Lanyard” nowadays, I’m flooded with memories of that specific time period, the emotions I felt then, even snippets of conversation.

Across the album, Shaw’s lyrics drift between absurd (“I’ve been thinking about eating that hot dog for hours”), tenderly doomful (“my only ambition is to grasp the roots of your hair”), and painfully real summations of our instant-gratification era (“do everything and feel nothing”). Her attention to detail, to all the banal details that round off the everyday nothingness of her existence—the big jar of mayonnaise, the tanned foot squeezing into a short boot, the Elmo costume, the Tokyo and Oslo and Rio de Janeiro bouncy balls (Instagram filters)—sparkles with the same dogged intensity as Proust writing about flowers. There’s something particularly apathetic about Shaw’s performance that makes her sound like an AI robot having a pre-programmed conversation with herself. Almost like there’s a computer-generated bank of random words, and her sole purpose on this record is to rifle them off one-by-one. There’s so much ennui and dis-passion in the voice. But there are also little flickers of humanity—moments when she pronounces a word strangely, like “baz-oo-kawh,” or makes a sudden sound (“huh!”), or describes a small, charming interaction (“pat dad on the head”), that pierce through her stony surface.

Check out Dry Cleaning:

https://drycleaning.bandcamp.com/

The list:

#20 - aya - "what if i should fall asleep and slipp under" and "Emley lights us moor"

#19 - rrodney - Jersey club remix of Trippie Redd ft. Playboi Carti’s “Miss the Rage”

#18 - aghast - “thas wut i do” (prod. lungskull & wavebird)

#17 - Yves Tumor - “Secrecy Is Incredibly Important To The Both of Them”

#16 - kaystrueno - “PRETTY B!TCHES NEVA DIE”

#15 - kurtains - “spawn”

#14 - Ecco2k - “PXE”

#13 - vertigoaway ft. schizoscriptures - “Break This The Breaking Point 2”

#12 - Baby Keem & Kendrick Lamar - “family ties”