– New Long Leg
The London art-rockers’ outstanding debut is a droll album full of surreal images, bizarre obsessions, and sense memories. The cumulative effect of Florence Shaw’s narration is inexplicably wonderful. On New Long Leg, Dry Cleaning emerge as a Rorschach test for listeners’ guitar revivalism of choice. There are echoes of Black Sabbath, the Smiths, the Strokes, even Wilco on the closest thing to a ballad, “More Big Birds.” But it amounts to something tougher and more original.