Tuesday, March 09, 2004
March 5: Silverchair - Neon Ballroom
Home country - Australia
There's a theory (not just mine, but others' as well) that your typical rock band's career goes like this: first album is all the songs you played before you were popular. If the first album is successful, second album is more of the same. Third album is the "difficult" one, where you spend a lot of time experimenting in the studio and come up with some intentionally "weird" tracks. Then once you're through that evolutionary period, fourth album sounds completely different from the first or second. Textbook examples are R.E.M., Better than Ezra, and Silverchair.
This is the "difficult" one for Silverchair, and it features mostly bad Nirvana ripoffs just like the first two albums. And somebody really should have talked Daniel Johns out of writing a song called "Anthem for the Year 2000" that featured the lyrics "We are the youth/we'll take your fascism away." That's just painfully bad. But then there's hints of a band trying to break out of its grunge cage: "Ana's Song" is a great tune, and the opener, "Emotion Sickness," is an orchestral grunge stormer with that dude from the movie Shine on piano.
So it's a mixed bag, but you've got to feel a little sorry for Silverchair: just because they wrote one really good song when they were 14, they got thrown into the international rock star cauldron a little too early and their lead singer ended up an anorexic (what did you think "Ana's Song" was about?). But don't feel TOO sorry for them; they're still big in Australia, and Johns just married fellow Aussie Natalie Imbruglia. As Adam Sandler might say, not too shabby.
There's a theory (not just mine, but others' as well) that your typical rock band's career goes like this: first album is all the songs you played before you were popular. If the first album is successful, second album is more of the same. Third album is the "difficult" one, where you spend a lot of time experimenting in the studio and come up with some intentionally "weird" tracks. Then once you're through that evolutionary period, fourth album sounds completely different from the first or second. Textbook examples are R.E.M., Better than Ezra, and Silverchair.
This is the "difficult" one for Silverchair, and it features mostly bad Nirvana ripoffs just like the first two albums. And somebody really should have talked Daniel Johns out of writing a song called "Anthem for the Year 2000" that featured the lyrics "We are the youth/we'll take your fascism away." That's just painfully bad. But then there's hints of a band trying to break out of its grunge cage: "Ana's Song" is a great tune, and the opener, "Emotion Sickness," is an orchestral grunge stormer with that dude from the movie Shine on piano.
So it's a mixed bag, but you've got to feel a little sorry for Silverchair: just because they wrote one really good song when they were 14, they got thrown into the international rock star cauldron a little too early and their lead singer ended up an anorexic (what did you think "Ana's Song" was about?). But don't feel TOO sorry for them; they're still big in Australia, and Johns just married fellow Aussie Natalie Imbruglia. As Adam Sandler might say, not too shabby.
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