After School Special

There's a good reason why the new release from silverchair, Neon Ballroom -- the third album from the Aussie power-grunge trio-is a watershed for the band. The band members, who were just 15 and 16 years old when their 1995 debut, Frogstomp, took the world by storm, have finally gotten out of high school.

"This album is very different for us," explains Daniel Johns, silverchair's guitarist, singer, songwriter and all-around guiding spirit, and who's all of 19 now. "The last two albums were very much kind of like a side project. We had educational things that we just had to get done. Music was more like a hobby. This album was the first chance that I've really had to actually sit down and think about what I want to do with music. So I thought if I'm going to do music as a career, I just want to establish silverchair as a band that's stamped our mark on music that's being played at the moment. So I decided to do something totally different."

Johns isn't kidding. With its melancholy ballads, textured arrangements, introspective lyrics and often exotic instrumentation (including orchestral flourishes, bits of electronica and some discordant piano passages from classical pianist David Helfgott, subject of the acclaimed movie Shine). Neon Ballroom is an ambitious departure from the stark bludgeoning metal grind the band purveyed on its previous released.

"Our first two albums were very stripped back and very raw," Says Johns. "It was all about teenager anger and heaviness. It was fun, but it wasn't challenging. With this album, I wanted to go against everything we had done before. I wanted to go against everything we had done before. I wanted to do a whole big kind of grand album; in some ways I think it will be perceived as being self indulgent, but that was all part of the master plan."

Lyrically, the songs are much more personal than those on silverchair's previous releases. "Emotion Sickness" deals with the pressures of being young, famous and in a public high school. "Between the ages of 16 and 18," Johns reveals, "I was bashed a lot because they couldn't handle that we were having a certain amount of success. They weren't from our school, but they were a lot older and a lot bigger than me. I never really talked about it until after I left school. Because I didn't know what was going to happen. I was too paranoid." So how does it feel to finally be out of school? "I'm very glad," Johns laughs "very glad!"

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