The Last Dinner Party – ‘Prelude To Ecstasy’ album review: an immersive art-rock experience
THE SKINNY: The long-awaited arrival of Prelude To Ectasy calls for your longest dinner candles, your most expensive bottle of red, your floatiest dress and your tightest corset. It’s a record that begs you to lean into it, to submit yourself to the dramatics and confessionals that have become The Last Dinner Party’s signature, and one that’s all the more rewarding if you do so.
The Last Dinner Party need no introduction. After building up a cult following as a live band across London’s indie venues, the lavishly dressed five-piece finally divulged their polished art-rock sound to the world last spring with ‘Nothing Matters’. In the nine months and five singles released since then, they seem to have become inescapable.
This fact could work against them, and it often has. If you’ve heard any song by The Last Dinner Party, or even if you’ve just seen a photo of the band, you could probably hazard a guess as to what Prelude To Ecstasy is going to sound like. It’s just as theatrical, ornate, and intense as the look and lore they’ve created for themselves, but this is precisely where it prevails. It happily puts noses out of joint.
Immersion is almost inevitable on their highly anticipated debut album, which delivers emotional ecstasy and agony in equal measure. The record is guided by Abigail Morris’s fluttering vocals, which contemplate envy, indecision and desire with unparalleled intent. Orchestral swells and art rock soundscapes mould around her emotionally charged romances and rumination with ease, somehow just as dramatic as her weighty words.
If you decidedly don’t like The Last Dinner Party, Prelude To Ecstasy certainly won’t convert you. Their sound is nothing if not consistent. But if you’re willing to hand yourself over to five artists who wield instruments like swords, it just might be your album of the year.
For fans of: Dripping dinner candles, catastrophising, and over-dressing to go to the supermarket.
A concluding comment from Tom’s mother: “Never before has Stevie Nicks been so effortlessly made to look casual in every which way. It’s the bold sound of an arty, cluttered apartment.”
Prelude To Ecstasy track by track:
Release date: 2nd February | Producer: James Ford | Label: Island Records
‘Prelude’: A literal prelude to the sonic ecstasy and agony that follows. Crashing cymbals and orchestral swells set the tone for an album that veers further into theatrics than most. (4/5)
‘Burn Alive’: A song as incandescent as its title suggests, ‘Burn Alive’ finds vocalist Abigail Morris ruminating on romance and regret, two topics The Last Dinner Party know and love. Gorgeous art-pop keys occasionally serve to lighten her blazing emotions. (4.5/5)
‘Caesar On A TV Screen’: Likening childhood to empire and London to Leningrad, ‘Caesar On A TV Screen’ finds The Last Dinner Party in their dramatic element. Morris is unapologetically self-important. The power in her vocals and words is only intensified by the instrumental ebbs and flows that bend and bow around her. (4.5/5)
‘The Feminine Urge’: Charting guilt and control, pain and poison, The Last Dinner Party contain the defiance and doubt of the feminine urge in just three-and-a-half minutes. Her delivery sits somewhere between the vocal acrobatics of Kate Bush and the dramatics of Marina Diamandis. (5/5)
‘On Your Side’: Kicking off The Last Dinner Party’s ventures from baroque into gothic balladry, ‘On Your Side’ shimmers with indecision and toxicity. Verses chart vampiric relationships and pleas for forgiveness, while choruses prove that old habits die hard as Morris makes misplaced promises, but the glistening outro is where ‘On Your Side’ really comes into its own. (4.5/5)
‘Beautiful Boy’: Newly committed to downtempo melancholy, ‘Beautiful Boy’ opens with eerie flutes and envy. Morris is held captive by ribbon and red lips, left longing for the freedoms held by beautiful boys. As the band harmonise to repeat the sentiment, it feels like they’re voicing the feelings of women everywhere. (4/5)
‘Gjuha’: As Prelude To Ecstasy passes its midpoint, Morris lends the microphone to keys player Aurora Nischevci, who delivers a brief interlude about her disconnect from her mother tongue. Nischevci’s lonely voice is gradually joined by her bandmates in an interlude that longs for connection and community. (4.5/5)
‘Sinner’: Pulsing with self-acceptance and breakbeat drum samples, ‘Sinner’ formed the perfect follow-up to ‘Nothing Matters’, a reintroduction to the band’s distinctive sonic dramatics. It still packs a punch, though it’s not quite as well-aimed as the newer entries into their catalogue. (4/5)
‘My Lady Of Mercy’: Wailing, moaning, and yearning with abandon, ‘My Lady Of Mercy’ is a well-earned moment of ecstasy. It’s at once sensual and playful, with lines that mischievously tumble into each other amidst dramatised declarations of desire. (4.5/5)
‘Portrait Of A Dead Girl’: One of the lengthiest entries on the album is also one of the loneliest. Between desolate pianos and uncompromising orchestral swells, Morris vows to die for someone who only “probably” won’t kill her. “Give me her strength,” the band repeatedly beg in unison as the outro spills perfectly into their debut single. (4.5/5)
‘Nothing Matters’: It’s still just as good on a hundredth listen as it is on your first. (4.5/5)
‘Mirror’: Sinking and stardom collide in vocalised sighs as Prelude To Ecstasy reaches the beginning of the end. Mixed feelings about fame or love turn into insecurity and even non-existence, but it’s the only thing Morris knows. An instrumental outro delivers the cathartic ending that Prelude To Ecstasy has more than earned. (4/5)
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