APRICOT VINYL

Though it's tame compared to the hairy soap that adorned Stumpwork, Secret Love's artwork sets the album's tone: Depicting Florence Shaw with one eye washed out, it's an image that's challenging, humorous, and strangely intimate -- in other words, quintessential Dry Cleaning. The band refreshes their musical vision on their third full-length, re-recording songs they'd worked on with Gilla Band and Wilco's Jeff Tweedy with producer Cate Le Bon. While their collaborations with John Parish on New Long Leg and Stumpwork put them on the experimental post-punk map, Le Bon opens up their music and makes the most of its malleability. Aside from the apocalyptic meditations of "Rocks," Secret Love is nowhere as noisy as the band's previous work; "Let Me Grow and You'll See the Fruit," a Pentangle-inspired ramble that borders on confessional, is more characteristic of its sound. Fortunately, the album's quieter approach leaves plenty of room for Dry Cleaning's inimitable juxtapositions: "Hit My Head All Day"'s slinking groove shakes its hips, but Shaw remains firmly in her head ("When I was a child/I wanted to be a horse/Eating onions, carrots, celery"). Whether they're contradicting each other or supporting each other, as on the jangly longing of "Secret Love (Concealed in a Drawing of a Boy)," the conversation between Shaw's words and the band's music is at its most lucid on Secret Love. The cleaned-up sonics also put more focus on Shaw's fully formed yet ambiguous character sketches, which remain the perfect vehicle for head-scratching, subtly hilarious lines like "It's a powerful boat for a powerful mind" ("Cruise Ship Director") or "The taste of flame-kissed natural fibers frozen at the moment of their incineration is what I live for" ("Evil Evil Idiot"). As deadpan as her delivery of those lyrics may be, Secret Love is far from emotionless. In fact, many of its standouts have a defiant streak of optimism. Despite the frustration, darkness, and cynicism they see around them, Dry Cleaning have enough hope to love, almost despite themselves on "I Need You" and wholeheartedly on "Joy," where they close the album by urging their listeners, "Don't give up/On being sweet." Dry Cleaning sound more expansive and present than ever on Secret Love, transcending their role as sprechgesang post-punk standard-bearers to become innovators whose surreal, poetic expressions of emotion reveal hearts as open as their eyes.

A1        Hit My Head All Day
A2        Cruise Ship Designer
A3        My Soul / Half Pint
A4        Secret Love (Concealed In A Drawing Of A Boy)
A5        Let Me Grow and You'll See the Fruit
B1        Blood
B2        Evil Evil Idiot
B3        Rocks
B4        The Cute Things
B5        I Need You
B6        Joy