- Frogstomp (20th Anniversary Deluxe Edition) · 1995
- Young Modern · 2007
- Neon Ballroom · 1999
- Frogstomp (20th Anniversary Deluxe Edition) · 1995
- Neon Ballroom · 1999
- The Best of Silverchair, Vol. 1 · 1994
- Freak Show · 1996
- Frogstomp (20th Anniversary Deluxe Edition) · 1995
- Diorama · 2002
- Neon Ballroom · 1999
- Frogstomp (20th Anniversary Deluxe Edition) · 1995
- Freak Show · 1997
- Neon Ballroom · 1999
Essential Albums
- In the lead-up to writing Silverchair’s fourth album, Diorama, frontman Daniel Johns stopped taking the antidepressant medication he’d been on for the previous two and a half years. Without it, he started experiencing the deep lows and intense highs the medication had levelled out, and it’s that spectrum of emotions that informs Diorama, with Johns determined to capture it all. While 1999 predecessor Neon Ballroom had flirted with musical progression, Diorama saw Johns shaking off the shackles of expectation, creating an album that once and for all severed ties with the band’s grunge past. Having drawn on the grim reality of his mental health on Neon Ballroom, here he became fixated on fantasy and escapism, nowhere more so than on opener “Across the Night”. A song about being in love with falling asleep because you go to a new world every time you dream, musically it mirrors that sense of wonder via lavish orchestration, all arranged by former Beach Boys collaborator Van Dyke Parks. Never before had Silverchair sounded so alive, so spirited and so joyful. “Tuna in the Brine” similarly feels plucked from a musical rather than a rock album. Over strings, brass and woodwind swirling dramatically around Johns, he sings about hiding his feelings from the outside world: “The light in my darkest hour is fear/Denies me of anything good.” Still, the musical grandeur carries an air of optimism. Even the most relatively straightforward songs—the anthemic power ballad “Without You”, the fragile “World Upon Your Shoulders” and the dreamlike “My Favourite Thing”—carry a sense of fantasy. Though they would’ve been a focal point of earlier albums, the Black Sabbath-indebted “One Way Mule” and the downtuned “The Lever” almost feel out of place here. This is, after all, a record which finds Johns singing a buoyant “do do do do do do” refrain in “Luv Your Life”, and which ends with “After All These Years”, a piano ballad allegedly written in 15 minutes, in which he sings, “After all these years/Forget about all the troubled times.” Sadly, the troubled times would soon return, when Johns was diagnosed with reactive arthritis not long after completing the album, confining him to his home, leaving him unable to tour on the album’s release. Regardless, Diorama stands as a testament to an artist stepping out of the darkness and into the light, no matter how fleeting it would prove to be.
- At one point during the writing of Silverchair’s third album, frontman Daniel Johns’ struggle with anorexia nervosa was so severe his weight dropped to 50 kilograms. Wracked with anxiety following the band’s rapid rise to stardom as teenagers, Johns entered the final year of his teens physically and mentally unwell, having spent six months shut off from the world, too anxious even to leave his house. Not surprisingly, with the exception of first single “Anthem for the Year 2000”, Neon Ballroom is almost singularly informed by Johns’ psychological state. Despite these circumstances—and Johns’ admission that while writing the album he’d fallen out of love with music—he succeeded in creating a record that saw Silverchair start to carve out their own identity. In many ways it’s the bridge between their first two LPs, the Seattle- and Black Sabbath-indebted Frogstomp (1995) and Freak Show (1997), and the increasingly experimental sounds they’d toy with on 2002’s Diorama and 2007’s Young Modern. Recorded with producer Nick Launay over seven weeks (compared with the nine days it took to record Frogstomp), the album makes it clear within the first seven seconds of opener “Emotion Sickness” that Silverchair are no longer content to trade off the back of their musical heroes. A song about trying to escape mental health issues without the use of medication—by way of contrast, in the Zeppelin-esque “Paint Pastel Princess”, Johns uses antidepressants as a metaphor for a saviour—it’s a majestic, six-minute-long triumph of lush orchestration, labyrinthine musical passages and chaotic piano courtesy of concert pianist David Helfgott. Its nightmarish lyrics (“Distorted eyes when everything is clearly dying”) are a perfectly matched, pain-riddled partner for its kaleidoscopic musical ambition. While it’s easily the most adventurous song on Neon Ballroom, the spirit of experimentation ripples throughout. Even when treading familiar musical ground—the pulsing metal of “Anthem for the Year 2000”, the punk fury of “Satin Sheets”—there is a twist, whether it be the eerie soundscapes and choral backing that envelop the former or the stabs of electronica in the latter. Arguably the album’s most emotional moment is “Ana’s Song (Open Fire)”, in which Johns addresses his eating disorder (“Ana wrecks your life/Like an anorexia life”) over a brooding verse that explodes into a chorus so anthemic it suggests maybe there is hope somewhere off in the distance. The string-laden ballad “Miss You Love”, by way of contrast, is a love song about not being in love, and not even caring about love.
Albums
- 2013
- 2012
- 2012
- 2012
- 2012
- 2012
Artist Playlists
- From “Nirvana In Pyjamas” to Young Modern heroes.
Compilations
About Silverchair
It’s still hard to believe that Silverchair were mere teenagers when their 1995 debut, Frogstomp, became one of post-grunge’s first global blockbusters. For a band that formed when they were still pre-teens attending school in Australia, the trio of Daniel Johns, Ben Gillies and Chris Joannou knew exactly what they wanted and how to achieve it. All those fantastic early hits—“Tomorrow”, “Pure Massacre”, “Israel’s Son”—are expertly sculpted slabs of angst-driven vocals, metallic riffage and hooks as barbed as anything that contemporaries like Bush and Candlebox were dropping. If ever there were a textbook definition of precociousness, mid-’90s Silverchair certainly were it. Yet they were just kids, and over their next handful of releases, their music was defined by a tension between increasing sonic maturity and lyrics (courtesy of Johns) that ruthlessly grappled with the pressures accompanying youth celebrity. This became all too clear on their second album, 1997’s Freak Show, a harrowing set rooted in psychic alienation, as well as 1999’s Neon Ballroom, an exquisitely textured (if no less emotional) epic packed with the kind of strings, electronics and psychedelic effects heard all over the mid-’70s classics from Led Zeppelin (a key influence for the trio). By the mid-2000s, Silverchair were in a good place, creating truly ambitious art, such as 2002’s baroque-informed Diorama, that pushed them far beyond post-grunge. But though they were barely in their mid-20s, the group were already weary veterans for whom fame had become an obstacle to personal growth. In 2011, Johns, Gillies and Joannou placed an already slowing-down Silverchair on hiatus while going their separate ways, leaving behind one of the most artistically impressive catalogues of their era.
- ORIGIN
- Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia
- FORMED
- 1992
- GENRE
- Alternative