Last Friday, The Last Dinner Party, a five-piece rock band from London, released their sophomore album “From the Pyre” — a sweeping work of theater that paints everyday life in dazzling color.
The strange, mythical 10-track record comes on the heels of top albums characterized by outstandingly clever honesty — see works by Audrey Hobert, Sabrina Carpenter and Olivia Dean. They’ve shown that one of the best ways to portray emotion in music is to tell it like it is. But The Last Dinner Party takes the opposite approach.
In promotional materials and the three music videos released for this album, band members dress as cowboys, centaurs and medieval queens. But The Last Dinner Party isn't merely telling stories set in a fantastical world — instead, they’re bringing the fantasy into daily life. Exes become prodigious hunters, and being ghosted warrants a duel. Religious figures occupy the same breath as reality TV in “Inferno”: “I’m Joan of Arc, I’m dying / Just waiting for your call / I’m watching ‘The Real Housewives’ / and crawling up your walls.”
The record’s drama is intended to give each real-world experience “the emotional weight it deserves,” the band wrote in a statement about the album. On lead vocals, Abigail Morris displays impressive vocal and emotional range, whether crooning over guitar or sustaining a high operatic tone. Her voice, aggressively dramatic and always musical, grounds the otherworldly album.
The song “Sail Away” contains some of the most touching metaphors in “From the Pyre.” Morris’s voice soars over a stripped-down piano, remembering “the drums on a CD like a wound.”
The Last Dinner Party also draws on themes of femininity and queerness. “Woman is a Tree,” the song at the album’s center, is an assertion of female power on an epic scale. In promotional materials, the band members are confidently feminine but also subvert the archetype of women in music: They scream, kick, arm-wrestle, chant and sing odes to gory battle.
Throughout the album The Last Dinner Party maintains this dichotomy: each song is alternately tyrannical and delicate. They assert themselves as mothers, hunters and the deer that are hunted. “I’m more than a girl, I am a seaside,” Morris sings on “Sail Away.”
With “From the Pyre,” The Last Dinner Party brings the alternative feminist rock of the ’90s into the modern world. They have created a saga you can sing to: a work of drama, but also a true rock album.
