An Aged Alternative Sound that Revitalizes the Genre, that should Catapult this Eager Group to Success
The Last Dinner Party is a group whose name essentially captures their mood. The members themselves seem to be—through listening to the angst of their sound alone—some well-to-do socialites sitting around a table discussing matters of interest having to do with their love lives, political affairs, and the history of the world. What’s definitely here are acoustics that have had a royal influence come over them. This album is something that needs to be featured in a major film, for starters, because it has that all-encompassing grip over its themes, allowing for it to resonate meaningfully with listeners who are grappling with the wild realities of the world today. Here there are portraits, one of them of a dead girl, and then there are feminine urges, beautiful boys, and the feeling of what it must be like to be burned alive—talk about quite the dinner party!
Coming out swinging right off the bat, The Last Dinner Party delivers thoroughly through the title song “Prelude to Ecstasy.” In a way it’s mysterious yet ceremonial. It’s also dramatic. With flutes and other triumphant instruments of old harmoniously establishing this grand soundscape, it challenges the age-old comfort brought about after hearing symphonies of any sort. Easily it is something that could rival John Williams’ countless scores, and listening to it actually feels like walking into a dinner party, which is fitting for this aptly named conglomerate of artists.
It feels as if this is music created by a group that has somehow traveled through time. They certainly could have thrived during the ’80s and back then probably would have rivaled the likes of The Smiths. The same can be said for how, in another reality, they would have gotten along smoothly throughout the ’90s and 2000s. Take “On Your Side,” for instance. It is a poignant piece emphasizing the power of connection in the darkest of times. This is a batch of musicians that wants to reason with their audience. By using, conveniently enough, words out of this song – they themselves proclaim that when a heart is breaking at 4:00 a.m., they’ll be there to hold their hands, stopping them from shaking. Throughout the night they’ll be on the side of the grieving and the lovesick. What could be more inviting than that?
“Caesar on the TV Screen” is a fragment of pure art. Its instruments are clean, and the instrumentation they create, so to say, is calming and gentle. A guitar floats over all, as the title invokes images of either something as poetic as the Caesar found in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar or something as Hollywood as an animated ape found in the flick Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Its playfulness could let it sit as part of a musical, too, so its grooviness and punkiness are misleading.
Then there’s “Burn Alive,” a track possessing drums that thump as consistently as a young heartbeat. In it is some dinner-party imagery, specifically in the imagery of candles and their wax, as well as the blood found in a guest’s glass. A regal grumbling hovers here, and the musings are agreeable, but a few are harsh. If someone traveling to the past were to blindly play this for somebody still existing in that past, especially a town-dweller living in Salem, Massachusetts during the 1600s, there could be possible confusion in mistaking the only voice they hear as that belonging to a witch.
All in all, The Last Dinner Party is on their way to stardom. No collective starts this way and doesn’t wind up catching fire. Prelude to Ecstasy is a straight journey into sound, a journey that along the way will invite the seeing of new colors, the exploration of new dimensions, and the discovery of new values. The only thing required is a willingness to welcome oneself to this dinner party, as everybody’s invited.
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