It’s hard to think of the last time a band elected to open their debut album with an orchestral overture. But that’s how the Last Dinner Party’s debut begins: woodwind, brass and strings turned up to 11, further decorated with crashing cymbals and shimmering harp. It’s so grandiose, even the director of a 1950s Hollywood blockbuster would have suggested his soundtrack composer dial it down a bit. It’s also bold to the point of seeming faintly provocative, but then if you were in the Last Dinner Party, you’d probably be feeling confident, too. They begin 2024 in receipt of both this year’s BBC Sound of… award and the Brits’ Rising Star gong. Their preceding 12 months have been an inexorable rise. They started selling out gigs when they had released less than nine minutes of music, were lavished with praise by everyone from Florence Welch to Garth Crooks (the latter feeling impelled to interrupt an episode of Football Focus to describe them as “fine young women making really exciting pop music”) and have weathered the inevitable accusations of being an “industry plant” that seem as much part of an artist’s swift progress in the 21st century as breathless this-band-will-change-your-life coverage in the weekly music press once was.
Still, you can see why people might look askance at the Last Dinner Party. They seem to have arrived fully formed, although that’s the result of nothing more sinister than frantic woodshedding during the gig-free Covid years: looking fabulous and teeming with ideas, among them their penchant for announcing dress codes for their gigs – Victoriana, Brothers Grimm, Velvet Goldmine – a smart way of both lifting their shows out of the ordinary and creating a sense of IRL community. Their debut single Nothing Matters featured a chorus so preposterously nailed-on that, on first listen, you could already imagine a field full of festival-goers howling along to it. Prelude to Ecstasy is well produced – boasting string arrangements mercifully less histrionic than the introduction might suggest, a glossy sheen and some nice touches courtesy of James Ford, the long, shoegaze-y coda of bending tones that concludes On Your Side among them – but it doesn’t sound that different from the video of their third gig that was posted to YouTube, sparking a stampede among major labels and management companies.
Said sound is genuinely striking. If the whole themed dress code thing vaguely recalls mid-70s Roxy Music – who didn’t explicitly announce how their audience should dress, but might as well have done, given that their gigs were staffed by crowds determinedly copying whatever look Bryan Ferry was sporting that week – the most apposite musical comparison might be Roxy’s glam era contemporaries Sparks. There’s a distinct hint of Russell Mael about Abigail Morris’s more rococo vocal flourishes and something of the duo’s penchant for high drama in the Last Dinner Party’s willingness to shift tempos and juxtapose musical genres midway through songs: Our Lady of Mercy jumps from sophisticated 80s-facing pop to a muscular hard-rock grind; Sinner shifts from staccato piano to itchy Franz Ferdinand-ish post-punk; there’s both a keen pop sensibility on display and a surprising number of what the Darkness’ Justin Hawkins approvingly described as “proper guitar solos”: lead guitarist Emily Roberts favours soaring, impressively stadium-ready axe heroics.
Operatic cut-glass vocals, sudden shifts in mood and tempo, big guitar solos, plus lyrics that transform relationship woe into the stuff of jump-scare-heavy crime drama (“now there’s blood in my lipgloss”, “I wish I had given you the courtesy of ripping out my throat”, “I am a dark red liver stretched out on the rocks”): as you might expect, there are moments when all this becomes a bit much, as when they break out the timpani literally seconds into Mirror, or Beautiful Boy sails a little too close to musical theatre for its own good. But it doesn’t happen very often, mostly because Prelude to Ecstasy is filled with really well-written songs. The rhythmic and stylistic transitions are handled so smoothly that they never feel episodic or meandering, all that woodshedding seems to have left them with both an enviable melodic assurance and a surfeit of fantastic choruses: not just Nothing Matters, but Feminine Urge, Burn Alive and – percussion excesses or not – Mirror.
Of course, they face the problem faced by all bands who arrive fully formed: if you turn up with your sound and image and songs just so, where do you go next? But Prelude to Ecstasy is a delight, filled with enough ideas to suggest that they’ll come up with just as many more the next time around: the Last Dinner Party’s confidence may stem less from the hype they’ve provoked than the fact they know how good they are.
This week Alexis listened to
Fabiana Palladino – Stay With Me Through the Night
Pitched somewhere between slick soul and the singer-songwriter approach of Natalie Prass, this is subtly funky and self-possessed.
