Dry Cleaning guitarist Tom Dowse once said, “I’m not really interested in being a technical guitarist, I’m much more interested in how much I can communicate emotionally through a guitar.” His playing on “No Decent Shoes for Rain”—the fourth (and presumably final) single ahead of the band’s sophomore album “Stumpwork”, due out next week—is perhaps his most expressive yet, setting the track’s blearily downcast tone alongside Florence Shaw’s bummed-out vocals. Like the unfortunate, ill-prepared pedestrian its title implies, the song finds Dry Cleaning assuming the perspective of someone emotionally unprepared for what life has thrown at them—this is rooted in truth, as the quartet made “Stumpwork” after having lost both bassist Lewis Maynard’s mother and Dowse’s grandfather.
The result, on “No Decent Shoes for Rain,” is unlike anything in the band’s burgeoning catalog: Dowse, Maynard and drummer Nick Buxton lay down a groove that warps and blurs like wet newsprint, while Shaw’s knowing non-sequiturs (“I’ve seen a guy cautioned by police for rollerblading”) cover, but can’t quite obscure the cold, hard truth: “My poor heart is breaking.”
The Fat Angel Sings 