Album Review: Prelude to Ecstasy, The Last Dinner Party
Wine and candle wax. Blood, teeth, and flames. Beauty. Sin, poison, lust, envy, and death. Power. Control.
These are just a few of the lyrics on The Last Dinner Party’s debut album, Prelude to Ecstasy, a triumph that brings to full glorious life the group’s maximalist world of decadence, hedonism, and, yes, ecstasy.
The band chose their name, which was initially just The Dinner Party, to evoke an extravagant, debauched gathering. And they’ve very well succeeded on this 12-track celebration that could have soundtracked the film The Favourite, painting scenes evocative of dimly-lit baroque halls filled with food, drink, music, and bodies teetering on the edge of perversion and madness.
The Last Dinner Party are Abigail Morris, Lizzie Mayland, Emily Roberts, Georgia Davies, and Aurora Nishevci. Their tightly woven songs sit on well-crafted beds of orchestration, pulling in bombastic, sometimes sinister strings and horns throughout. It’s a rich tapestry that lives up to the hype the UK band have enjoyed for the past year.
Pre-album-release singles Nothing Matters, Sinner, My Lady Of Mercy, and Caesar On A TV Screen laid the groundwork for the “party.” Lead singer Morris, who wrote Nothing Matters, has said it has a “sense of unbridled, untamed love that’s also a little perverse.” Sinner curses the unwanted shame of growing up queer, and My Lady Of Mercy is a stunner with three different tempos, contrasting upbeat, bouncy sections with gritty, glam guitar and layered harmonies that, along with similar elements in Caesar On A TV Screen, evoke Queen’s A Night At The Opera.
But there are quiet moments as well – both introspective and crushingly sad in vivid, grotesque imagery. The Feminine Urge explores intergenerational trauma between mothers and daughters: “I am a dark red liver stretched out on the rocks / All the poison, I convert it and I turn it to love.” In the ballad On Your Side, the singer recalls a toxic lover: “And you smiled so sweetly as you threw me / Down the rocks into the seaweed.”
All of the women in this band are consummate musicians. They all write, they all sing, they all play multiple instruments. Lead guitarist Roberts plays a hauntingly lilting flute on Beautiful Boy, while in Gjuha keyboardist Nishevci sings in her family’s native Albanian about feeling like a failure for not becoming fluent in the language.
A must-listen track is Portrait Of A Dead Girl, whose pretty piano and Morris’s shapeshifting vocals rise into a classic rock ending with a killer lead guitar solo and an audience chant-along of “give me the strength.”
One point of curiosity is where the group goes from here. If they’ve self-described a specific sound so thoroughly that they’ve named themselves after it, what will LP2 sound like? Have they boxed themselves into their unique blend of theatrical art-rock? With the exception of Beautiful Boy, there’s little nuance on Prelude. Maybe LP2 will achieve greater contrast and subtlety as they hone their sound.
Still, when the album closes as it opened with a chamber orchestra, the last lyrics of Mirror – “And I fade away” – will stick with you all day. That is, if you don’t go straight back to track one.
Standout Track: Portrait of a Dead Girl
Memorable lyric: “I wish you have given me the courtesy of ripping out my throat
Listen for: Bass guitar in My Lady Of Mercy
