THE LAST DINNER PARTY’S SOPHOMORE ALBUM, ‘FROM THE PYRE,’ HEALED MY RELIGIOUS TRAUMA
Are you a 20-something-year-old queer woman with an overcomplicated relationship with your mother? Did you grow up in a Catholic church decorated with the prettiest stained glass you’ve ever seen, but now you haven’t felt “God” in 10 years, and now all you can think when you see it is how you are in pieces that don't make a pretty picture? Have you ever been through a breakup so gutwrenching that you couldn’t get off the floor or eat for a month, and now you move through the city you live in looking for yourself in new places because you want to be someone you’ve never met before?
Graphic by Paige Firsten
Images via The Last Dinner Party
If you answered “yes” to any of these hyper-specific questions, then I’m sorry. But, the five-piece British queer-rock band Last Dinner Party is just the one for you, with a sophomore album built for all healing religious trauma needs.
The ten-track album has all of the important signatures of a Last Dinner Party Album, theatrics and poignant lyrics, and not one song that fails to illustrate the carnal pain and ancestral fear deep within a woman’s body. Two overarching motifs stand out throughout this album, both lyrically and musically. The instrumentals are packed full of rock influences, specifically the guitar in ‘Rifle,” followed by the vocals and twinge in “I Hold Your Anger.” It’s classified as indie-rock, but throughout, it gives a taste of 70’s influences, Rush-like lines, and Zeppelin-like melody. It’s still dramatic and theater-like, but the instrumentation doesn’t lean that way as much as in a lot of their past work.
Compared to their first album, Prelude to Ecsasty, From the Pyre is much faster speedwise. Every song has vocals or basslines that feel deeply driving, almost desperate. Where their first album felt like experiencing a play or opera with a thorough storyline to follow in each song, this one feels like music that clawed its way out of their chest, bloody, raw, and ready to meet the world. The best art there is in the world is also the most vulnerable, and listeners feel that in pretty much every song here.
The most engaging songs on this album combine vocal harmonizations that feel like a church choir, and layer them with hard, guttural guitar lines that are deep and usually in a minor cadence; Second Best, “The Rifle,” “Agnus Dei” and “Count The Ways.” The use of religious themes like playthings is deliciously refreshing. The angelic, open-mouthed harmony used when singing hymns in church mixed with a musical heart that goes all the way.
Another track with a driving harmony, “Woman is a Tree” in its opening lines, was so deeply satisfying; crunchy, crisp, magnetic. It’s a sound that comes all from a bright sound in the mouth, and it creates this blunt vocal effect. Fitting, as this song is about the rawness of womanhood in returning to nature.
There is also an additional layer of familial issues that makes themselves thematically known in “I Hold Your Anger.” This track references such a specific feeling, an acknowledgement of having to carry your mother’s emotions on your shoulders, and the complex way that plays into ever deciding to have a child of your own. Complicated, emotional. In this track, Aurora Nishevci, the band’s keyboardist, takes the lead on vocals instead of lead singer Abigail Morris. Deep down, this feels like the story she needed to tell. There’s a wide range of topics covered on this album, but all of them feel tied together through personal experience.
“The Scythe” is a standout track on the album. The premise of the song is a breakup that feels like death. It’s the second-to-last song on the album and is the climax, the peak. The track is not particularly complicated. Beautiful and cinematic, sure, but not complicated. Unlike a usual breakup song, where there’s a feeling of missing someone, hating someone, still loving someone, or of anger, resentment, or depression. ‘The Scythe’ has none of that.
It’s an honest acknowledgement of the truth. Of a breakup that feels like dying. The echoey lyrics at the beginning sort of feel like getting home from a funeral, everything still in its place, the house unchanged, but you know something is gone, turning each corner, waiting for what was once there to appear where it always is. But it’s not there, and it’s never coming back. It’s an honest final acceptance, which is what would be required to write a song like this.
The line “Please let me die on the street where you live,” is brutal and blunt, and acknowledges, without anger or dread or fear, a simple truth. The finality of finishing seeing someone in this life, an acknowledgement of seeing someone in the next one. It was bound to run its course, and inevitably, it did.
Anyways, 10/10. TLDP, I love you. I hope they keep making art that changes me.
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