You remember that cute malcontent in high school? The one with pale skin and piercing eyes that hung out with the cool kids but never quite fit in? This record would have got them into bed. Probably several times over. There’s something dark and very sexy about Dardanelles’ first album – most obviously James Nicholson’s bass guitar, which swims under the surface of Mirror Mirror like a leviathan of sound, enormous and inescapable as the low-end throb that soaks nightclub bathrooms and reverberates down the street.

Over the top of Nicholson’s gargantuan pulse, the other three musicians – Josh Quinn-Watson, Alex Cameron and Mitch McGregor – come out to play. On ‘Natural Selection’ they keep things sleek and simple with a piano and disembodied, sometimes ghostly vocals, and then punctuate the song with a few 15-second bursts of discordant noise perhaps otherwise known as a chorus. The album walks a fine and well-balanced line between pop melodies and disarray, with a rhythm section designed for the dancefloor.

So, you know, it’s really quite good and has a very cool single called ‘Footsteps’ and it’s a big step up from the Melbourne band’s last EP and so on. There is something lacking, though. Dardanelles are still missing that sense of spontaneity that makes a band truly special. Everything on Mirror Mirror sounds a bit too nostalgic and deliberate. There’s nothing blatantly derivative – just this unshakeable feeling of familiarity, haunting as the album itself, which prevents things from really going off. So come on boys, shock me.

by Andrew Ramadge