Prelude To Ecstasy has our attention, an obvious chance for The Last Dinner Party to tell stories and leave future debate to the chattering classes.
You shouldn’t pay them any attention, but recently there was a survey highlighting the supposed gap in attitudes between men and women; the latter, it said, were more ‘liberal’, whatever that means in the twenties.
Whether you believe that stuff or not, it’s still difficult to see a group like The Last Dinner Party coming to pass if genders were reversed; meeting in their teens whilst at university, both their music and visuals are sensual without being sleazy, functioning as mutual declarations of independence.
Men, it seems, are also more likely to swallow conspiracy theories, such as the one that has them as some kind of nepo industry plants despite an archive of gigs available online for anyone to watch, some even from before they added ‘The’ to their name to avoid any unlikely confusion with a hip-hop collective.
It shouldn’t surprise anyone in turn that an industry long on building hype has managed to elevate the buzz around the quintet to stratospheric levels, but after what’s seemed a much longer wait than it’s actually been, Prelude To Ecstasy has our attention, an obvious chance for the group to answer questions, tell stories and leave any future debate to the chattering classes.
It will surprise nobody to read that the whole thing is from its very first moments in the mode of a stage show, the overture Prelude conjuring up images of the assorted players getting into position and waiting for their cues.
What follows uses this idea as a theme rather than hiding behind it; de facto opener Burn Alive pivots around singer Abigail Morris’ gutsy trill as it weaves a mostly orthodox gothic pop course, whilst on The Feminine Urge she pirouettes up and down the scales gymnastically, Kate Bush and Anna Calvi presumably nodding wherever they happen to be listening.
As the listener absorbs this it becomes apparent that there’s an obvious duality at play. Tracks like Caesar On A TV Screen – more or less a rock opera, complete with steepling key and tempo changes – and My Lady Of Mercy run fast and loose, living in the real, flesh and blood world of 2024 but also living something conceptually higher brow, a conscious passing on greyness and the straight life.
Critics will point to a perceived reliance on faux-romanticism, the blusher and rouge of torch song Beautiful Boy flirting with self-indulgence (although indulgence is admittedly a default setting here) while Ghuja’s lament in keyboardist Aurora Nishevci’s Albanian mother tongue is sincere but a refugee in of itself.
For beginners though, Prelude To Ecstasy is long on what you probably came here for: to escape the grind and imagine yourself into the kind of world presented by Sinner, its electro pop frizz joyfully straddling the divide between lovers and haters. More deliberate and raising the dramatic ante, Portrait Of A Dead Girl is a festival headline closer in waiting, the ensemble vocals eventually reaching a choral peak against a proggy, kitchen sink backdrop.
Even for a record which maybe unfairly has a lot riding on it, the peak is still to be found at the beginning, that is, in the band’s first single Nothing Matters. As familiar as it’s become, there’s still no escape from that wonderfully pretence-heavy chorus – ‘And you can hold me/Like he held her/And I will fuck you/Like nothing matters’ – the song’s otherwise elegant curve a lesson for writers new and old.
Is it really always going to be boys versus girls? The Last Dinner Party could care less, and Prelude To Ecstasy is their symphony in a million parts, one you can play yourself with a little help from the dressing up box.
Over to you men, let’s see you nail a part other than being your awkward self.
