Album Review: DRY CLEAN ONLY by S!LENCE & tenten
Over a run of tenten beats built from samples, S!LENCE runs dry-cleaning bills, luxury watches, and a brutal New York winter through his verses. It's the funniest, most controlled record he’s made.
The underground music scene in New York City is defined by density. On DRY CLEAN ONLY, a verse here is a thicket you have to push through. From out of that scene and off the loose collective centered around phiik, Lungs, and Fatboi Sharif comes S!LENCE. He has it all locked in a private language that doesn’t include a key. He’s built that language out with the producer tenten, who provided every beat on the project.
It all kicks off with a dry-cleaning store clerk explaining matter-of-factly (in a tone that suggests he’s explained this hundreds of times) that dry-cleaning isn’t dry at all, that clothes are soaked in chemical rather than water and, you could even say, is organic. From there, money, pride, faith, and a brutal winter are processed through the same lens of maintenance and what it means to be controlled by one’s need. Garments pile up—Issey Miyake trainers, ACG gear, Grand Seiko watches, a vintage bubble jacket—before dapping up Mr. T, still wearing dry-cleaning tags attached to the back of his attire.
It doesn’t make sense to lump such disparate things together as S!LENCE does. The opening lines of “Meanwhile...,” a cocktail recipe featuring ginger beer and bitters along with dark rum, quickly shift to S!LENCE calling himself the holder of the golden gun and a million dollars he made selling tachini pans, followed by a 101 of Japanese stunts, which eventually collapse onto a plane of despair: “Memory splash across the brain/Energy dissipates/I continue to dissociate/But my appetite for hatred was sated.” He quickly extricates himself from the despair, announcing, naturally, that he’s one of God’s favorite humans. There’s no interstitial content; jokes serve only to strengthen the stark dread that his straight face imparts on absurd content.
On “ACG Slippers,” he equates a rival with a comic book character: “I’m a blue ring octopus/You a common crook of Metropolis/I’m in Gotham wearing ostrich/You have penguin problems.” When reaching the title track, the comic book logic takes a darker tone—a fat dummy has its throat slit while the children of the village laugh along. Money on this project never just is; it’s tied up with Scripture. The prosperity preacher Reverend Ike can be heard sampled throughout, once explaining how, when a woman asked him to pray that someone repay her three hundred dollars, he suggested that rather than waste a prayer on such a meager sum, she might as well pray it into a few million. S!LENCE crafts his rhymes around that same ideology.
“Grand Seiko Divine Time” lists a declined card just below heartbreak and offers the hook’s hook as, “If it wasn’t for me/You’d never put that gold on top of your teeth/If it wasn’t for me/You’d never found out how high you could reach.” “Duck Hunt!” positions the whole thing as a motivational exercise in monetizing hope, culminating with a skit where two men debate whether the bag is automatic or if he’ll have the amount cut if they encounter any further mishaps.
Pride, the titular subject of the album, gets its own treatment on the title track. In it, S!LENCE imagines himself a boastful death—being lifted by the Most High as a venerable old man with an exceptionally fly dead body and mourners playing a harpsichord made of pure gold—only to immediately pivot back to this: “I never took a dive or realized why even during times I wanted to die.” He continues to cycle through his tale, through a trek with frostbitten fingers, through a chase with his face camouflaged by a full-zip BAPE jacket, before ending with browning water spewing from his tap and the pigs outside. One of his most poignant lines summarizes: “Can’t believe what pride cost him.”
Tenten builds his beats from samples, meticulously altering the sound from song to song so as to prevent S!LENCE’s pace from becoming stagnant. He’s especially careful on “Issey Miyake Trainers,” his sound lush yet unhurried, lending even more weight to S!LENCE’s luxurious claims. He responds to the tempo by slowing his delivery and punctuating the pauses between bars. Conversely, on “Go Figure!?” the quicker, lighter beat matches S!LENCE’s quicker cadence as he’s able to seamlessly shift back and forth to flip an entire friend’s downward spiral within a verse. The unwavering beats he lays at the bottom leave S!LENCE room to speak his mind.
Neither of the two outsiders who appear on the album are merely cameos. Imani Nichele kicks the first verse of “Baroque N!ggas” and pays no regard to the elegance suggested by the title; she keeps the art at the fore, referencing a Scarface-level tone to say something along the lines of, “We don’t reap what we sow, oh God/Ask that sun, ‘cause it look like whatever is up is down.” Imani’s verse gives S!LENCE a jumping-off point where he then ties crime and home together, birds hidden inside a chiffon robe, smoke spewing from the air vents, cardinals believing the Pope has died. The second guest scarcely raps. In “24 Karat Gold Plate Pain,” Jesse Rack$on talks his way through the entire song. He shouts out the beat, jokes that it sounds like “what white folks think their vegan coffee shops sound like,” and then refers to the harsh winter endured across the New York metropolitan area and a dry-cleaning bill that dwarfed his rent. Then he ties everything together in the title’s message: He has taken life’s pain and gilded it in pure gold. His sharpest line comes at the end, directed at anyone else foolishly trying to do the same: “They look like shit/They feel like shit/And I can see that shit.”
Near the end of the album, a sampled voice reads what might as well be a directive: “The most important kind of art is the art you wanna make that’s pretty to you and it might not be pretty to anyone else,” she says. “You gotta learn your own heart, you have to grow in your own viewpoint and let it grow.” S!LENCE has been practicing that philosophy throughout, in his own skewed vernacular. On “ACG Slippers,” he calls his verses “the gospel according to me.” On “Grand Seiko Divine Time,” he self-identifies as the quiet man working much more than a mere aura, his longtime executive-producer alias transformed into an indictment of his own productive output. His parents have the last word on the project, in “Go Figure!?” telling a young S!LENCE, “You are a snot-nosed kid old enough to know what’s the truth, and the whole island depends on you, okay? Does that compute?”
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Meanwhile...,” “The Incalculable Price of Pride,” “Dry Clean Only”