Before we get into it, reader, can you accept that The Last Dinner Party are a band born of privilege and high academic study? Of poshness, classical composition, private education, master’s degrees in music? No? Might as well stop reading then. That’s where they’re from. Let's have a valid debate somewhere else about the arts shutting out those with less money. Right now, though, The Last Dinner Party are fab live, look great, and, in From the Pyre, deliver a worthy follow-up to their vibrant debut.
They’re preposterous, of course, but wonderfully so, their music Chantilly-laced through with the excesses of Sparks and Queen. But they’re no pastiche. They bring their own Bat For Lashes-meets-Kate Bush extravagance to the party. That, alongside strident musical skill and an ambition that struts to the borders of prog but is too pop-baroque to cross. Indeed, From the Pyre is even more over-the-top than its predecessor.
Where "Nothing Matters" was the whopper from Prelude to Ecstasy, the lead single and stand-out singalong this time is the Bobbie Gentry-murder-blues pomp of “This is the Killer Speaking”. Other big bold ones include the rockin’ “Agnus Dei” (“Here comes the apocalypse/And I can’t get enough of it”) and the operatic honky-tonk of “Inferno” (I’m watching The Real Housewives/And crawling up the walls”).
Throughout, Emily Roberts plays guitar to match any Seventies fret-wrangling hero, but the five-piece aren’t overconcerned with off-the-shelf riffs’n’tunes. From the piano-led, gnomic, lost love paean “Sail Away” to “Count the Ways”, in which singer Abigail Morris channels a mad-woman-in-the-attic while her band become Electric Light Orchestra, the album leaps entertainingly all over the place.
Sometimes their excesses miss the mark, as on the choral overdrive of “Woman is a Tree”, but mostly, as theatrical and overboard as it is, From the Pyre is pumped full of catchy bits, literary show-off lyrics, vamping melodrama, and instrumental originality. Unbeholden to the usual, it’s both outrageous and a breath of fresh air.
Below: Watch the video for "This is the Killer Speaking" by The Last Dinner Party
