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Date Posted: 02:53:46 04/04/02 Thu
Author: nora
Subject: HAHAHA!!! 'small furry animal with sharp teeth'...

this is a new review that was posted at silverchair.nu about our boys in Juice magazine...this guy's pretty funny eh? ;) enjoy!!!

mahalo
nora

Silverchair's Diorama
9/10

When I was 11 I spent most days in the museum that was adjacent to my school. They were building a dinosaur section in the basement. There were little boxes in the wall that featured Jurassic scenes they called dioramas. There was one about the fall of the dinosaur age, where the nimble little animals defeated the giant lizards because they stole their eggs and ate the young.

Now we know: a) dinosaurs were more like birds than lizards; and b) they were destroyed by a fucking big meteor. This proves that the more you go on, the less you know. Nonetheless Iıve always liked the small furry animal metaphor, and itıs been my guiding principle in looking at most things ­ but especially pop music.

On their fourth album silverchair are clearly a different beast. So the question Iım asking myself is, have the small furry animals we knew as silverchair turned into dinosaurs? This is not the teenage grunge band that made the last three albums. This is not giving the kids the crunchy strum and drang of yesteryear. Oh no. This is not the sound that sold eight million albums; this is the beginning of a new thing. Evolution at work.

There is clearly chemistry at play in the trio, with Ben Gillies thumping drums and Chris Joannouıs grounding bass; but with each release Daniel Johns moves further into his own world. The rhythm sectionıs role here is more subtle than previously, being principally to ground the singer and stop him floating off into his own ether. For much of this album, the rest of the band isnıt much there. That said, the biggest change is with Johns himself.

From the kick-off heıs been an angry, alienated, mostly miserable, whining prick ­ whether letting fly at the world or just lacerating himself. On the evidence of Diorama, the frontman has matured. He sees the world in an expansive sense, with all the nuances that make life interesting. The self-absorption that was so much a part of his songs has gone, as announced on the first single ³The Greatest View². Is Johns, a formerly neurotic and tortured Novocastrian, happy now? The answer is, on the evidence of this, yes. He sounds like heıs having the time of his life.

Mostly the change is evident in the music and the arrangements. Produced by David Bottrill (Tool, Peter Gabriel) and Johns, the album opens with a string passage orchestrated by Van Dyke Parks that clearly references his previous finest moment on Brian Wilsonıs ³Surfıs Up². Parks is one of the true eccentrics in music, whose orchestrations and compositions are part Debussy, part Glenn Miller and part rock. His collaboration with Wilson on the Beach Boysı Smile album made his name, even if the record became too weird to release. Parks went on to other things, including a series of impenetrable solo albums as well as early work for Ry Cooder, Randy Newman and more recently Rufus Wainwright. His signature song, ³Surfıs Up² is a haunting, mysterious nocturne where the melody carried by Wilsonıs piano twinkles like starlight. If you look closer, itıs like starlight as painted by Van Gogh.

Diorama begins where ³Surfıs Up² left off, in the night with the world and all its people asleep in their dreams, and the singer alone ³can hear the invisible star fall² as Bob Dylan said: ³Only you can hear and see, behind the eyes of the sleepers, the movements and countries and mazes and colours and dismays and rainbows and tunes and wishes and flight and fall and despairs and big seas of their dreams/From where you are you can hear their dreams.²
On this album, the singer walks through dreams ­ his own and others ­ where we hope for great and grandiose things to happen to us. Where we can be happy. Where nightmares come. On previous outings, Johns sounded afraid to be hopeful and sceptical of happiness. This time he has a more rounded view.

There is nothing on silverchairıs Frogstomp, Freak Show or Neon Ballroom that hints at the melodic sophistication of Diorama ­ the way the vocals rise and fall and come back on themselves. Johnsıs singing range is heightened, moving regularly from a whisper to a scream ­ but not in the mechanical verse/chorus loud/soft formula of grunge but in whimsical, organic lines that make no sense except to themselves. On a couple of moments, notably ³Lever², the Black Sabbath heart of silverchair still beats, and the Gillies/Joannou Axis of Evil can still pound out the rock.
This is not a silverchair album as we know it. This is not modern rock as we know it. Itıs a small furry animal with sharp teeth.
­ Toby Creswell

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