It’s no coincidence that Kramer – the US producer, not the doofus from Seinfeld – has had a hand in two breakthrough releases this year: Leader Cheetah’s The Sunspot Letters and Bridezilla’s The First Dance. The knob-twirler behind such seminal slowcore acts as Galaxie 500 and Low has a siege-mentality approach to recording. He puts young bands in strange locales, restricts their access to the outside world and when the shit hits the fan – in the case of Bridezilla, starvation, synchronised menstruation, mild paralysis and Oolong tea dependencies – the sadistic fucker flicks the record switch.

Conceived in a barn alongside the Colo River in rural NSW, The First Dance is an album defined by its insularity. It cares little for real-world trends, moving along to its own fractured beat with scant regard for who’s actually listening in. At times the whole thing is so frustratingly impenetrable you feel like giving up and listening to something more immediate like The Black Lips instead. But be patient with this record – put it on in the background, listen to it while you jog or do the ironing – and it’ll burst open like the pomegranate still-life on the cover, revealing far more than the mundane exterior it initially presents.

Bridezilla, of course, are masters of the slow reveal. They emerged in 2006 as a high-school band lacking the clarity of vision to pull off their big ideas. They were oddities from the outset: a group of teenage girls with old-world names – Millie, Daisy, Pia May and Holiday – and a guy known plainly as Josh, eschewing the traditional rock format in favour of sax, violin, guitar, vocals and drums (in that order). It posed some early teething difficulties – at times they sounded like a mini-orchestra tuning up in the pits – but they’ve since found a way to make each instrument coexist.

The First Dance is all about the instrumental interplay between its players, and like the lone bachelor in a sharehouse full of women, drummer Josh Bush never lets bravado get in the way. He’s expressive, colourful, inventive, but never obtrusive or showy. On standout track ‘Beaches’, he effectively assigns himself to click track duty, letting Pia May Courtley’s guitar handle the rhythm and texture while he plays pick-up sticks on the snare.

Violinist Daisy Tulley and saxophonist Millie Hall are the conjoined twins of the bunch; two distinct personalities sharing a central brain. One moment they’re playing in unison, the next they’re dancing around each other intuitively. On ‘Soft Porn’, they play a neat little one-two in the verse, while ‘Forth And Fine’ showcases their classical sensibilities, conjouring images of maypoles and garden parties and picnics by the lake. Courtley is limited somewhat by ability, but plays to her (mostly rhythmic) strengths. Her breakthrough moment is on ‘Magnetic Arrest’ when she finally cuts loose with a cascading delay.

As for singer Holiday Carmen-Sparks, her place in this delicate ecosystem is not as obvious as you’d think. She’s a force to be reckoned with on stage, but her natural theatricality is curtailed somewhat by Kramer’s reverb-heavy hand. The effect is at turns intoxicating and ethereal. Like Mazzy Star’s Hope Sandoval or Broadcast’s Trish Keenan, her voice is a textural element, often heard at a distance; wistful, breathy and frustratingly out of reach. It works because she’s yet to develop as a lyricist (“Whisper in my ear/Hold me closer, my dear” is a typically syrupy example), but the flipside is that it puts Bridezilla in that class of band – from My Bloody Valentine to The Cocteau Twins – where vocals are just part of the overall musical picture.

To pull that off over 40 odd minutes and 14 tracks, requires a great deal more consistency than Bridezilla offer on The First Dance. Indeed for every triumph like ‘Beaches’, ‘Queen of Hearts’ or ‘Tailback’ – songs blessed with memorable hooks and atmosphere – there are downcast plodders such as The Walkmen-esque ‘Lottery Tickets’, ‘White Feather’ (not a Wolfmother cover) and closer ‘The Last Dance’, which wash over you without so much as an aftertaste. Overall, it’s an engaging and mostly excellent first outing, but if Bridezilla are going to take that next step – and they certainly have the raw materials to do so – they’ll have to get that balance between melody and texture right.

Of course, it’s not perfect. The first dance never is.

by Darren Levin