The Singles Jukebox

Is this party a potluck? I can bring the croutons and parmesan and anchovy and th- oh… different Caesar. Never mind.

[Video]
[4.05]

Iain Mew: Saltburn and all associated with it, mobile network adverts soundtracked by Bloc Party and Klaxons, rock bands as the most hyped new thing and launching their album with re-promoting their debut single: the UK has a big mid-’00s revival going on. In this case specifically, if likely coincidentally, it’s a revival of The Hot Puppies. The Last Dinner Party’s UK #22 hit “Nothing Matters” with all its theatricality and romantic determination pointing in the same direction, is at least as great as “The Girl Who Was Too Beautiful.” There’s no re-release edition of it to issue, though, so for new material we get “Caesar on a TV Screen,” which sounds like a set of sketches for the four B-sides its CD singles would have had.
[4]

Harlan Talib Ockey: Every year, there’s another Very Buzzy UK rock band. Usually shortlisted for the BBC’s Sound of… award, in recent years the title’s gone to Wet Leg, Yard Act, and now The Last Dinner Party. “Caesar on a TV Screen” is essentially a Queen song; the chorus, in particular, sounds like “Killer Queen” overlaid with “We Are the Champions.” The bombast is dialed so high that even the guitar disappears in the mix during the chorus, and there are instrumental touches that are almost inaudible, like the arpeggiated piano in the second prechorus. Meanwhile, the lyrics are crammed with redundancy. “Caesar” has a strong underlying concept, but the references to Leningrad are completely irrelevant to it. They’re never elaborated upon apart from a line about “Red Scare and how they got it right” (which is a [0], if you ask me). It also rhymes “Leningrad” with itself, hilariously, and couplets like “When I was a child / I never felt like a child” sorely needed another edit. I can’t ave this. 
[3]

Ian Mathers: I am actually worried people will think I am being glib or sarcastic here, so let me emphasize that I sincerely think it’s great that we’re at a point where the new NME-friendly UK buzz band can contain zero men and be just as fatuous, overhyped, and almost existentially disappointing as all the ones that were only men (and I am basing that on this song and “Nothing Matters,” FWIW).
[5]

Taylor Alatorre: Sounds pretty expensive. You’d think that with all that expense they could’ve sprung for more than the basic package of historical references, though.
[4]

Will Adams: Turgid, self-satisfied art rock that feels way longer than 3:49. That’s bad enough. Worse: having to think about Red Scare while listening to any music, regardless of quality.
[3]

Alex Clifton: The really annoying thing about this song is that there’s no way for it to flow. By the time the first slow verse ends, it kicks into a higher gear — awesome, now we’re getting started! But then another tempo change stymies the song, and just when you think the band might be finding a groove it slows down once more. This is several neat ideas for songs stitched together very poorly, like a quilt made of all different sizes of patchwork squares. The thing is that The Last Dinner Party thinks this sounds really cool, and it doesn’t; it’s sloppy and half-baked. If TLDP took themselves slightly less seriously this might’ve worked. They’re a young band, and so they deserve some grace while they’re figuring themselves out. As it stands, though, this is a bunch of people who read The Secret History and said, “oh, that’s awesome! Let’s do our own depraved bacchanals!” while totally missing the point that the aesthetics are there to hide everyone in that book sucks. Docked an additional point for rhyming “Leningrad” with “Leningrad.” If your whole aesthetic is “we’re smarter than you because we read old books,” prove it by finding a creative rhyme.
[3]

Katherine St. Asaph: The sewer-gutter center of a Venn diagram composed of these three sets: tuneless songs; Amanda Palmer revival songs; songs that mention Red Scare.
[2]

Nortey Dowuona: The bassline from Georgie Davies does what a lot of basslines in non bass/drum driven music does — hum along below the guitar, remaining as close to the rhythm set by the guitar and speeding up when the drums (done by Rebekah Rayner, who will hopefully join the band ASAP) snap in during the final chorus. But it does not drive the song. It is purposely hidden, unwilling to emerge until just the right time: when the vocals die down and the song rends itself apart. And even then, it leaves its blade in Abigail Morris’s back. It doesn’t pull back — it leaves without so much as a trace.
[6]

Hannah Jocelyn: On “Caesar on a TV Screen,” Abigail Morris calls on the spirits to unsex her: “When I put on that suit/I don’t have to stay mute/I can talk all the time/Cause my shoulders are wide.” Reading it literally, Morris writes as if patriarchy is biologically determined and not societally forced upon us. But I find the fetishization of the male form on this song and fellow TLDP song “Beautiful Boy” fascinating, a new kind of female gaze driven by a mix of resentment, envy, and desire. (It’s the same thing I found unintentionally fascinating about the band’s film equivalent Saltburn.) James Ford and Alan Moulder makes this sound so STIFF, no dick joke intended — nobody sounds like they were on the same planet while recording, and it’s the same polish that plagues “Nothing Matters.” The cumulative effect is ‘…huh.’ The death knell is the complete lack of groove, which is baffling considering Ford’s work with Jessie Ware. The percussion section sounds like an Addictive Drums preset! How are you supposed to be the new Florence + The Machine when you don’t have any toms?? Much like Saltburn, this thinks the mere existence of the female gaze is enough, but the rest is so prim and proper that anything interesting feels purely by coincidence. Also, the Red Scare reference is such a groaner: when Barbie did gender essentialism jokes better, you know you’ve got nothing to say.
[3]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: I want to respect the ambition here but sometimes ambition is dogshit — this is high concept without having any ideas, sweeping but empty. They gesture towards grandiose art rock but in execution undercut themselves — the song lurches from movement to movement, a queasy set of grooves that fail to leave much of an impression other than one of ill-defined size.
[4]

Isabel Cole: Vampy and ambitious in a way I think I admire, but I can’t help wanting this, perhaps unfairly, to be a little messier than it is. All that roiling, secret yearning, the desperate grandiosity tap dancing along the edge of the pit of need — I get it, but for all the bombast, something about it feels at a remove, a little too well-behaved to really make me feel the hunger. Without that, I also find myself less inclined with each listen to have patience for the various attention-grabbing vocal tics.
[5]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: What a voice: it can snarl and embody grace and shoot for theatrical grandiosity within the span of a minute. And yet, it makes me feel nothing. The instrumentation is equally miserable, ambitious but with zero finesse. I’m always up for artists piling on ideas, but the more I listen, the more it feels like an empty spectacle.
[3]

Leah Isobel: Every generation gets the Marina and the Diamonds they deserve.
[4]

Dorian Sinclair: “Caesar on a TV Screen” pulls off the neat trick of being both too much and too little song simultaneously. It does this by sounding like scraps of three unfinished songs stitched together, with no attention paid to whether any of them actually fills in what the others were missing. That said, even if I’m intellectually left unsatisfied, I am on a deeper level predisposed to respond well to this kind of arch, self-consciously literary baroque rock. I was a Rasputina fan in high school, for god’s sake. This shit is like catnip to me.
[6]

Rachel Saywitz: One time in my undergraduate classical music history course, my professor played a clip of Handel’s Giulio Cesare, where mezzo-soprano Sarah Connolly was playing the title role (because Caesar would normally have been played by a castrati in the 1700s). I was so in awe of this woman playing a domineering, brutish man, even as the music itself was light, airy, and elegant; I rushed to find the full opera afterwards to watch. “Caesar on a TV Screen” gives off a similar energy — Abigail Morris sings as if she is the planet’s center, her melodies leaps into dark, blinding caverns but still manages to land lightly, feet first. The Last Dinner Party have made their splashy debut off of this dramatized glamour, which have lended themselves to a slightly polarized response. And “Caesar” is, no doubt, pretentious: it sweeps from 6/8 to 4/4 time like a corrupt, self-serving royal; its lyrics are at times bizarre enough to run the risk of performing empty metaphors (see the verse about Leningrad and Red Scare). But I can’t swear it all off, not when I hear, “I’ll be Caesar on a TV on a screen,” Morris’ voice layered with reckless abandon, and sharp horns and piano gassing up her cocky self-affirmations. That dream of adding a truly masculine edge to my femininity feels so unattainable to me, which is why I gravitate towards art like this. It’s a bullish want, to be a king. But just the want is enough for me, at least for now.
[7]

Alfred Soto: Histrionics abhor a vacuum.
[3]

Michael Hong: Every section is overacted in completely unpleasant fashion: the swooping balladry of its first verse is so wretchedly overdramatic, the second verse’s pomp and circumstance grows more troublesome with each line, and the chipper turn of the pre-chorus sounds hollow. This feels like a middle-school performance of a poorly-written monologue with the kind of cumbersome music to go along with it.
[1]

Jibril Yassin: We’re due one middling group of wide-eyed, Brit art-pop worshippers every generation, I suppose. 
[5]

Tara Hillegeist: Literate and snarling, singer Abigail Morris siouxsies her way through “Caesar”‘s archly ironic, post-everything, ABBA-like melodic progressions like a ghost of Pipettes past with the promise of a manifesto to match hiding… somewhere, surely, behind the next curtain, yes? But, regrettably, we are no longer in the era where a manifesto is to anyone’s interest, even when they’re selling insincerity this acidic and pastiched; a manifesto would go a good ways towards affirming that, if nothing else, they take their nothings seriously. And that is, at the end of the day, the problem; it’s fairly obvious the joke is on our song’s narrator from the start, all tortured comparisons to much-besieged historical cities aside, because nobody is stupid enough to compare themselves to Caesar, even at his height, without also realizing they’re inviting a reciprocal fall. All this talk of becoming iconically beloved is an obvious counterpoint to the absent truth that our narrator is ironically unloved, particularly by themselves. The point is for the fall, even if only as an allusive presence, to make us feel something; failing that, at least make it hit hard enough the landing becomes a good joke. This, though? This feels like nothing so much as the Saltburn to a better song’s Brideshead Revisited, and like that movie, it matters very little that this, too, is in on the joke of the original — if it only half-completes the necessary punchline of the follow-through on its own, has it really done enough to make it worth my time finishing the sentence for it, just for a laugh? Still, every generation gets the New Young Pony Club its shoe collection deserves, and… well. You know what they say, when the shoe fits.
[6]

Jacob Satter: Henry, the dadgum theater kids are in the recording studio again.  Quick, get the flit!
[4]