From the second it arrived from England final yr, the Final Dinner Get together’s “Nothing Issues” was the sort of rock (or “rock”) file that didn’t appear to exist anymore. A superbly sneaky single, the band’s ode to a bootleg encounter opens just like the sound of ABBA with a hangover. Then the sweetness falls off, the music begins hammering, and singer Abigail Morris will get to the purpose: “And you’ll maintain me like he held her/And I’ll fuck you want nothing issues.” Throw in a screechy guitar solo and Morris’ concluding swoop, and “Nothing Issues” was the heady cocktail of cabaret, dank indie and wuthering-heights pop we would have liked, even when we didn’t understand it.
Acceptable for a band that got here collectively simply earlier than and throughout the early years of the pandemic, Prelude to Ecstasy, their first full album, will be the splendid soundtrack for re-entering a messy world newly open for enterprise. Very like “Nothing Issues,” songs like “Caesar on a TV Display screen” and “Burn Alive” begin like hung-over reveries earlier than vaulting into trampoline pop, wrapping up with crashing crescendos. Over the course of an album, that strategy veers in direction of system. However there’s no denying the way in which their blowsy, unrestrained songs knock you upside and down and depart you with a dizzying excessive.
ABBA homages resurface, as do ideas of Florence and the Machine. However Morris’ voice has a savage, slicing flutter all its personal, and the Final Dinner Get together have their oddball moments too: The prolonged breakdown in “On Your Aspect” that appears like an digital model of a Sonic Youth suggestions maelstrom.
The Final Dinner Get together’s uninhibited aspect extends to its lyrics, which recount one intense, maybe temporary, carnal relationship after one other. “Oh, pull your boots on, boy, and put me down,” Morris sings in “The Female Urge.” “I’m solely right here on your leisure/I’m a darkish purple liver stretched out on a rock.” In “Portrait of a Useless Woman,” Morris spews about “the time I wasted in your mouth/Waves that crashed in opposition to your chest, again and again.” Regardless of the sexuality (the band members establish as non-binary), the mixed temper can be very post-lockdown: Let’s throw warning to the wind, since nobody is aware of what’s across the subsequent bend.
“My darling, consider me I used to be born to be with you,” Morris sings, “but it surely’ll be me that the world will reply to.” The artistic ambitions that energy every observe make a line like that greater than an empty boast. Jim Morrison as soon as sang that he wished the world and he wished it now. The Final Dinner Get together need no matter’s left of the world, within the time it has left. And from the sound of it, they’ll go down swinging, in each approach.
