The Last Dinner Party — From The Pyre — review
Despite suspicions of contrivance, The Last Dinner Party released one of rock history’s greatest debut albums in 2024’s Prelude To Ecstasy. Queen crashed into Siouxsie and the Banshees in a joyfully flouncy celebration of Gen Zee-ness. But where to go from there? How would the band ever top anthemic sublimity like Portrait Of A Dead Girl and Nothing Matters?
Frontwoman Abigail Morris’s tear between classicism and liberated postmodernity continues, notably on Count The Ways: ‘I can hear screams that should be for me’, the closest thing to a straight love song TLDP have yet released. The video for the track features the band exploring a mini dolls house environment, like a Tim Burton film produced by Tracey Emin.
Abigail and guitarist Emily Roberts have somehow become the Bono and The Edge of their generation, a consistently dynamic and inventive duo, ably supported by the rest of the band. The acapella at the start of Woman In A Tree is truly avant-garde, Laurie Anderson-style exploration, before the song goes in a pagan, baroque direction, albeit with thrilling nods in the direction of what was once might have been called ‘cultural appropriation’ (Disney choir?)
Channelling Nick Cave, Kylie Minogue and, yes, Joan Jett, lead single This Is The Killer Speaking sounds like something of a moonshot for the American market with its old-time gangster swagger and ‘na na na na na’ refrain; though with the kind of 360 wraparound promotion that TLDP enjoys from their on-it management and Island Records, who knows what ‘breaking America’ means anymore? I Hold Your Anger is an excellent song, if the register sounds uncharacteristically low for Morris’ voice: ‘I never know where others begin and I end’, she baritones.
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Sail Away is a pretty, nostalgic travel ballad, as Morris appears to reflect on those left behind as her star rises, the piano of Trinity Laban alum Aurora Nishevci (yep) tinkling evocatively behind our ambitious heroine, the choir’s ‘I’ll take you with me anywhere’ seeming to try to connect two rapidly departing worlds. ‘I’m Jesus Christ, I’m swinging in a gallery in France’ we hear on album closer Inferno, with the singer’s literary wit reverberating throughout, as she watches Real Housewives while ‘drinking the dust of an inferno’.
The stated intention of From The Pyre (expecting a witchhunt-style backlash?) was to be more ‘personal and earthy’ that its predecessor, and it certainly achieves that. While the shock-of-the-perfectly-formed-new is absent, TLDP’s depth of understanding of the rich dynamics of rock’s history is expanded upon, the references getting more oblique, and the postmodern classical/baroque situationism firmly in place (which presumably can’t go on forever — where is TLDP’s Sporty Spice phase? Ok please don’t).
But ultimately it’s the opener Agnus Dei that shines brightest, and most completely: ‘Here comes the apocalypse, and I can’t get enough of it’ intones Abigail, double-guessing all those fatalistic YouTube headlines, Emily playing out long with a Claptonesque solo of all things. Speaking of YouTube, there is a telling interview between a young Gen-Z chap and his dad as they first listen to Prelude To Ecstasy, as the older man is in paroxysms of delighted surprise as to its content. American moonshot or not, From The Pyre again presents TLDP’s canny ability to appeal to multiple ‘demographics’, from furious young women to classic rock old men, and does it, again, with a delicious verve.
Listen here: https://open.spotify.com/album/3xxkjx6Hgl8sWpNfuqhHtD?si=DhYdQSmlTp6CFDKOnVKq4g
