Friday on My Mind: Dry Cleaning speaks its own post-punk language

Friday on My Mind is a highly subjective, curated rundown of five of the cooler things happening in Montreal during the weekend.

Dry Cleaning

Saturday at Foufounes Électriques

One of the reasons I love British alt-rock quartet Dry Cleaning is because lead singer Florence Shaw isn’t really a singer. Guitarist Tom Dowse, bassist Lewis Maynard and drummer Nick Buxton form one mighty hot power trio — think Gang of Four meets Bad Brains — and then Shaw basically does stream-of-consciousness spoken word on top of their tight post-punk sound. It’s very cool.

In a recent Zoom interview from their homes in Camberwell in south London, Buxton and Dowse talked about how they ended up with Shaw as their lead vocalist. The three musicians were playing together in a garage and they were having trouble finding a singer. That’s when Dowse thought of his friend Shaw, who was a university lecturer and not a singer.

“At that time, I was hanging out with Flo quite a bit because we’d studied together and we were showing each other drawings and stuff like that,” Dowse said. “I’d always thought Flo was hilarious. She’s a really funny person. And she’s always been really good at using words in her artwork.”

For Dowse, when forming a band “you think of the social group you’d like to be in. And then you give someone a job. … It’s not like you have to pass a test, like, ‘What’s your skill level?’ It’s more like limitations are actually attractive. What you can’t do is what’s attractive. I think people should do that more often. The experience we’ve had with Flo shouldn’t be exceptional. It’s a shame that it is.”

I told them how cool I thought it was when I first saw them at the Fairmount Theatre here a couple of years back. The three musicians were rocking out big time and meanwhile Shaw stood completely still, almost in darkness, reciting her lyrics. Usually it’s the opposite, with the lead singer moving the most.

“It’s inverted, isn’t it?” Dowse said. “It should be us standing still.”

Added Buxton: “It just happened naturally. It’s not something we ever plotted out.”

Their third album, Secret Love, came out in January, four years after their last album. After making two records with producer John Parish at Rockfield Studios in Wales, they worked with a new producer, Welsh musician Cate Le Bon, and recorded the new album mostly in France. They told me they liked that Le Bon took them out of their comfort zone.

One of the fun things about Dry Cleaning is Shaw’s dry absurdist wit and the odd stories chronicled in her lyrics, like on Cruise Ship Designer on the new album, which is, yes, about someone who designs cruise ships.

“I’m a cruise ship designer / I’m striking while the iron is hot / I’m making the most of a bad situation / Cruises are big business / I don’t personally like them / But I need to serve a useful purpose / I desire very much a place in society.”

I mean, how can you not like someone who can come up with lyrics like that?

Tickets: evenko.ca

New Candys

Friday at La Sotterenea

New Candys kind of sound like The Jesus and Mary Chain if they came from Venice rather than Glasgow. Dark, brooding, post-punky, psychedelic. Good.

Tickets: blueskiesturnblack.com

The Christophers

All weekend at Cinéma du Musée

The new Steven Soderbergh film has a great premise. The adult kids of a famous painter, Julian Sklar, played by Ian McKellen, hire an art forger (Michaela Coel) to work with Sklar as his assistant and at the same time to complete some unfinished paintings of his, which they can then sell. IndieWire’s review opined that it is “easily (McKellen’s) most essential screen performance since The Lord of the Rings.”

Tickets: cinemacinema.ca

To Move Across the Land: Colour Is Not Neutral

Saturday at Art Mûr Gallery

Twenty-one Indigenous artists from various countries — including Sweden, Guatemala, Mexico and Nigeria — have contributed to this show, which runs Saturday to June 20. The opening reception is 3 to 5 p.m. Saturday. The gallery is closed Sunday. Admission is free.

Information: artmur.com

Luka Sulic

Sunday at Théâtre St-Denis

All you need to know about Luka Sulic is that the virtuoso Croatian-Slovenian cellist was one-half of the popular duo 2Cellos and that he cites those two hitmakers Beethoven (the guy famous for old chestnuts like the Ninth Symphony) and Max Martin (the writer/producer behind many Britney Spears and Backstreet Boys chart-toppers) as his formative influences. Yes, be very excited — or very afraid.

Tickets: evenko.ca

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