Two years ago at this same venue, The Last Dinner Party stood on the MTELUS stage wide-eyed, watching a packed floor sing every word back at them. Flowers were thrown. They giggled through their bow. Tonight, the room is just as full, and nothing about them reads wide-eyed anymore.
Support came from Irish four-piece Florence Road, who played through most of last year’s Fall Back and all of Spring Forward. Grunge-flecked indie rock with enough grit to work as a warm-up for what followed. Hanging Out to Dry landed well; Goodnight even better. Worth keeping an eye on.
By the time The Last Dinner Party walked out, MTELUS had done its usual thing: floor packed tightly, balcony full, the room carrying that particular warmth of a crowd that dressed for the occasion. Gunne Sax dresses, bolo ties, platform boots. The band’s own look has shifted from the corsets-and-gowns era into something closer to medieval revival and southern gothic, and their audience tracked that shift accordingly.
Agnus Dei opened the set. Not the most obvious choice, a deeper cut by any measure, but it set the parameters immediately: big choral swell, controlled tension, guitarist Emily Roberts moving between a St. Vincent Goldie and a black Flying V with the ease of someone who has stopped thinking about the instrument entirely. She is one of the more compelling guitarists working in this kind of theatrical rock right now, and the riff into Count the Ways that followed made the case plainly.
Vocalist Abigail Morris is the kind of frontperson who makes a large room feel smaller. Short dark hair, gladiatorial posture, and a specific quality of attention she directs at the crowd that reads as genuine rather than performed. I have a bit of a crush on her, which I’ll acknowledge and move past. During Caesar on a TV Screen, she crossed the stage beneath a large ruched white curtain and faux-marble backdrop, the staging half church, half Roman forum, and neither element felt gratuitous. The visuals here function as extension, not decoration.
One notable absence: bassist Georgia Davies, who left the tour early with an injury, flying back to the UK. The band dedicated On Your Side to her, Morris reading the chorus’s loyalty plainly. Bass technician Max Lilley played Davies’ ribbon-adorned bass for the rest of the night, and if the bottom end felt slightly different, the band absorbed it without any visible loss of footing. A footnote: I bought a signed album at the merch table, not cheap, only to get home and realize one signature was missing for obvious reasons. Georgia, if you’re reading this, I’ll take a 20% discount.
I Hold Your Anger stopped the room differently than anything else in the set. Keyboardist Aurora Nishevci took the lead, sitting at the grand piano, singing “I don’t know if I’d be a good mother” with the kind of directness that makes a crowd go still. Before Gjuha, she spoke about her Albanian roots, her parents’ immigration, the desire to reconnect with a language she didn’t grow up speaking fluently. It was one of those between-song moments that could easily tip into oversharing, and it tipped nowhere near there.
The moodier material from From the Pyre worked better live than I expected. Woman Is a Tree opened with the band gathered under dim light, delivering an a cappella intro rooted in Eastern European folk vocal technique. The corvid mobile suspended above Morris during the verses added to a specific unease the song was already building. Rifle took a different angle, Lizzie Mayland delivering the verses with the poise of a jazz singer before the chorus broke it open.
Before Nothing Matters, Morris asked the audience to put their phones away. The request landed. For a few minutes, the whole floor was just there, bouncing, singing the chorus back at full volume, Morris sprinting along the barricade with her arms swinging like she was conducting something she couldn’t quite contain. She came back for the encore and led the room through a choreographed dance sequence during This Is the Killer Speaking that should have felt chaotic and mostly just felt good.
I came into this show half expecting a band ready to step up to arenas. The room suggested they could. But watching Morris perch on the edge of the stage to serenade the front row during Sail Away, you get the sense they’re not in any particular hurry to leave rooms that still feel like this.
Review & photos – Steve Gerrard
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