When the success of your career begins to take shape even before your songs are publicly accessible and can be listened to freely, the respectable has the legitimate right to hesitate and doubt the plausibility and effectiveness of said proposal. Come on, the eternal doubt between being faced with a true revelation or a manufactured product that the media will have to end up talking about. The very young members of the British quintet The Last Dinner Party They are aware of being playing with that pressure from minute one (few bands end up opening for the Rolling Stones without even having released their first song), and even knowing that the focus of the most critical expectation was going to rest on them, their Unusual fortitude has allowed them to sign a letter of introduction to the world that captures both the exceptionality of their packaging and the splendor of their talent.
As soon as those first orchestral bars, purely cinematic and overwhelming, occur throughout its opening minute and a half, it is clear to us that “Prelude to Ecstasy” (24) is not just a debut. From their respective previews, we knew well that all Abigail Morris and her band had to offer us was art, haute couture, romanticism, baroque excess and classical hedonism, but now taste her twelve cuts in one go, twinned by that delicious melodramatic context that the defines, enhances and underlines the nuances of a singular work that finds at the root of theatricality and operatic rock the honeys most conducive to distancing itself from conventional pop.
His lyrics, sprinkled with passion, religious iconography and raw poetry, escape any usual lyrical archetype and opt for intricate structures that, combined with the most immersive evolutionary fantasy (“On Your Side”) and the transcendental preciousness of the high endings (“Mirror”), they are captivatingly unique. And, led by the invisible hand of James Ellis Ford in the production, the particular epic of these Londoners manages to evolve until it makes its way above its vast references, finding its own voice straddling the feminine sovereignty of ABBA (“Sinner”), the dark epicness of PJ Harvey (“The Feminine Urge”), the most bombastic glam of the seventies (“Portrait of a Dead Girl”) or the ancient tragedy of Sappho herself (“Language”). A soil fertilized with beautiful nutrients that turns the pages of this confessional diary into a rear window with views of the most endearing privacy of those responsible (“I wish I knew you before it felt like a sin”), showing us in the process a liberating and choral subtext, eager to break taboos from a queer and close narrative that removes the foundations of its past (“Teach me how to do as you do, guide me, show me how”they sing in “My Lady of Mercy”).
Knowing that we have to, at a minimum, equate the product with the hype created around its respective advent, The Last Dinner Party debut, showing us all that they live up to any forecast predicted about their work, sowing in us from now on the need to have them again in our country with their first job in hand, and unleashing our doubts about how they will manage to overcome in the future such an exquisitely round first album.