Silverchair - 'Young Modern'
2007

I really have to begin this one with a quick recap. Silverchair, back in the 90s, were cherubic juvenile rockers from Australia who wanted very badly to sound like a Seattle band. Soon after getting signed and releasing their debut, however, they decided to move in a less derivative direction, adding orchestral touches to their music, until their last album, Diorama, consisted mainly of tuneful modern rock balladry buoyed up by lush orchestral arangements. A lot of Silverchair listeners consider this their finest hour, but I'm not much of a ballad listener. I prefer Neon Ballroom and Freakshow with their balance between riffy, somewhat heavy stuff and the softer, more intricate material.

Sometime in the early oughts, Silverchair hit a hiatus as main man Daniel Johns got on with various things in life. One of these was Dissociatives, a collaboration with electronica artist Paul Mac. The resulting album was a mix of electronica and quirky pop that felt too twee and and light to my tastes.

Now, Silverchair is back in action, but the fact that Johns has carried Mac back with him to the band suggests that they won't sound like any of the old Silverchairs did.

In fact, what we have here is a mix of very quirky pop music overlayed with various tones and textures, much like an album by The Beatles or Beach Boys from the latter part of their career. Fittingly, Van Dyke Parks, who also collaborated with Brian Wilson, adds arangements to some of these songs too. So what we have here is no longer dervative grunge, grunge plus orchestra or even the lush ballad rock of the last album. Instead, it's a quirky mix of songs that seems to draw from all sorts of diverse influences, none of which hark back to Seattle, circa 1991. A very diverse set of songs that perhaps aims to be the Pet Sounds or Sgt. Pepper's of its era.

That seems to be the ambition anyway.

In practise, any album with the cringe-inducingly sappy ballad 'Waiting All Day' would tend to be disqualified from keeping such august company. But that's my little tic, don't pay it too much mind.

On the other hand, the 'Those Thieving Birds (Part 1)/Strange Behaviour/Those Thieving Birds (Part 2)' 3-song suite is actually pretty cool. It's very ambitious, and it nearly succeeds in being a classic sequence of epic pop music. 'Mind Reader' is upbeat in a way that veers between chirpy and manic, and manages to be more Art Brut than anything I've heard by Art Brut, and cop some Ziggy-Bowie vibes as well. 'Young Modern Station' is a bit studied and over-produced like everything here tends to be, but even so, the sheer joyous feeling of playing together again comes through. 'Straight Lines' on the other hand is little more than a standard modern rock power ballad, very disposable. Perfect single material, in other words. 'Reflections Of The Sun' is perhaps the most succesfull ballad here, and it's refreshing in its relative straightforwardness. 'If You Keep Losing Sleep' is anything but straightforward though, very Beatles-esque totally mad pop rock. More Macca than Lennon, if you know what I mean. Then there's 'Low' which keeps threatening to rip off the lick from 'While My Guitar Gently Weeps', and 'Insomnia' which kinda rocks in a very queasy way. 'All Across The World' ends things on an epic and psychedelic note, and makes it impossible not to trot out the Abbey Road comparisons.

The Eiderdown-Stuffing Bottomline: Uhh. I hate trying to summarise every song around, but this album is too wilfully varied to sum up as whole in any easy way. In a way, it puts me in mind of a transitory album by The Who, where the band has already shot its load on a bunch of classic stuff and is lurching around wondering what to do next, trying a bit of everything. But is it Silverchair's 'A Quick One' or is it their 'Who Are You'? Only time will tell, I suppose. I certainly can't - this album is as intriguing as it is confusing. A bit of everything. At least they're not playing it safe.

Silverchair - Neon Ballroom

1999

Rating - 8/B

(Because Prem asked...)

Let's see now, Silverchair...they were that novelty act from Australia, right? Back in the 90s? Those children who dressed like they were from Seattle and played exactly like Nirvana and/or Pearl Jam?

Er, yea, okay.

If you ask me, Silverchair started showing a broader songwriting imagination than derivative riff-based grunge rock on their second album, Freakshow. But it's on Neon Ballroom where their growing artistry and songcraft (well, Daniel Johns' anyway) really really explode all over the place. And it isn't just the orchestral arrangements either - stripped down to their essense, songs like the grunge-band-with-piano-and-strings epic 'Emotion Sickness', 'Ana's Song (Open Fire)' and 'Dearest Helpless' (which isn't much embellished in any case) are very good songs, with good melodies and hooks and different parts interestingly and intelligently structured and ordered.

Having said that, the orchestration really lifts this album. Those strings and pianos on 'Miss You Love' take a vaguely REM-ish tune and move it into another dimension altogether, for instance. But Daniel Johns' middle-eight on a lightly fuzzed guitar and the increasing use of distorion and feedback at intervals in the second half of the song add as much to the dynamics as the orchestration. Point Of View is another really good song with a great vocal performance, where the orchestration only augments an already well developed song structure.

Not everything is quite as stellar. 'Do You Feel The Same' is a saccharine pop-rock song that goes nowhere, 'Black Tangled Heart' is a bit overwrought to be really gripping (and relies excessively on orchestral lushness as opposed to a well thought-out musical framework underlying the embellishment) and 'Spawn Again', a perfectly good screaming riff-grunge workout, feels too at odds with everything else - it was written earlier for a movie soundtrack, as a matter of fact, and rejigging it for this album wasn't really needed. 'Anthem For The Year 2000' of course became dated a year after the album was released, and is musically too simplistic, being built around a very basic riff that basically goes on forever, mutating a little into a barebones version for the verse and layered with odd noises that can't conceal the very primitive musical idea at play here. It's a pity they had to put in these songs, as if compelled to fulfill some rock-out quota, especially considering that 'Dearest Helpless' and 'Satin Sheets' get pretty rocking in that appropriately grungy manner without ruining the flow of the album or belying the band's development. The album closer, 'Steam Will Rise', reconciles the two sides of this album' sound excellently, too, building to a truly climactic end.

Neon Ballroom sees the Chairs' early promise actually delivering - though I wonder whether anyone involved in their early success expected their big leap forward artistically to be in this direction. The next album, Diorama, expanded on the orchestral aspect, but was a bit wieghed down with bland moderate-modern-rock songwriting in many places - the price of maturity? They've been on an extended hiatus since, but have a new album slated for release this year (2007). If it lives up to the level of songcrafting ability on this album, it just might be a surprise hit of the year, even if the whole concept of a grunge-inspired band seems irrelevant in today's indie/garage-retro rock climate.

The Eiderdown-Stuffing Bottomline: Think of this as a dark horse album, then. Grungestruck kids evolve into a pretty decent modern rock band with some neat songwriting chops and a gorgeous orchestral backing. Not all the material matches the ambition and evolution on display, but at least half of this album stands as one of the better moments in the dismal world of second-generation grunge. Possibly the finest moment of that regrettable phase, really, when you consider the competition consists of trash like Creed and Godsmack. Pity the vocals are just a bit too whiney at times, but this is grunge, after all.