Press
04-02-1999
Silverchair Goes Orchestral "Neon Ballroom"
By J.R. Griffin (Launch)
Silverchair's new album, Neon Ballroom, is the band's most thought-out
and time-consuming piece of work. Filled with heavy doses of
orchestration, piano, and string arrangements, it took the band two
months to record as opposed to its usual two weeks. The album's first
single, however, Anthem For The Year 2000, is a pure fist-pumping rock
anthem that came to the band's 19-year-old singer/ guitarist Daniel
Johns in a dream.
"It's always been my dream to play Wembley Stadium [in London]," says
Johns. "In the dream we're playing a show to a packed house and the PA
blows up and the crowd just starts clapping and cheering and shoving
their fists in the air. I woke up with that image in my head and said,
'I want to write a stadium rock song. I want the crowd to do that.' I
wrote the song in like five minutes.
"It's a great link between the last two albums and this album," he
continues. "It's a really good step into the new material. If we would
have released anything else [from this album] first it would have been
too dramatic of a change."
Criticized for being too derivative by clinging to the riffs of
Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Black Sabbath, silverchair is branching out in
new ways with Neon Ballroom, adding choirs and keyboards to various
tracks. The band even enlisted the help of famed Australian pianist
David Helfgott -- whose life story came to the big screen in the 1996
film Shine -- and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra for the epic track
Emotion Sickness.
"Having strings in rock songs isn't particularly original," says Johns.
"But when I wrote these songs, I had these parts in mind. So I wrote
the songs for the strings and piano parts as opposed to adding them on
later as filler. This is an orchestral album."
While a majority of the album is made up of the slower, more personal
and poetic side of silverchair -- Johns used poetry he wrote last year
while living alone as a springboard for most of the songs -- there
still is heavy riffing and other rock trademarks intermixed throughout
the album.
"We're a rock band," says Johns. "When people were calling us a rock
band that sounded like Black Sabbath or Nirvana they thought they were
insulting us, but we never claimed to be anything different. Now we've
grown up a bit and wanted to try something new. And it's exciting. But
I think we're still basically a rock band."