I don't think anyone could ever argue that Diorama is Silverchair's best album, but there is no denying that it sounds incredible. The production effort is probably greater than the three albums that came before it combined, and it pays off because it still sounds fresh today.
When I got into Silverchair they'd released three albums with one of the most clear trajectories in all of rock music - their transition from grunge to polished rock was perfectly linear, so it was no surprise what their fourth album, Diorama, would sound like. I was probably most into Neon Ballroom at the time, so I was fine with this transition, although never really got into this album as much as I thought I would at the time; maybe I still needed a bit more of that early-days grunge involved.
Diorama came out when I was at college and I found a copy in a shop called Essential Music in Southampton, a little shop a few roads behind the main shopping area that had been pretty good at getting Australian imports in - I'd bought The Freak Box, collecting the singles from Freak Show, from there a year earlier and picked up a 7" of The Greatest View and the boxset of singles from Diorama over the following 12 months. The cd was £14, which was a lot at the time, but worth it - apparently it was only about two weeks after it'd come out. Anyway, it seemed that Silverchair had picked up quite a following of people I half-knew in college and when word came around that I had a copy, I had all sorts of people I'd never really spoken to coming up to me and asking if they could borrow it - for a few weeks the cd just seemed to travel around people as they taped their copies before eventually making its way back to me. I don't know exactly how many people heard this album first because of my copy, and I definitely didn't know half their names.
I don't know whether everyone else was a bit underwhelmed too. Diorama is a mixed bag of incredible orchestral instrumentation and unexpectedly huge riffs. You could never call it a heavy album (except for One Way Mule and The Lever) but there are classic Silverchair grungey guitars throughout. However, more often than not, they're just part of a song - Greatest View starts off loud but can't keep the momentum going, Without You's riffs end up disappointingly low in the mix during the chorus, World Upon Your Shoulders finally explodes into something brilliantly heavy and Too Much of Not Enough brings them in and drops them away more times than I care to count.
On the other hand you've got songs like the huge opener Across the Night, Tuna in the Brine and the equally huge closer After All These Years where the orchestra and Daniel Johns' vocals dominate - he really upped his game on this album and is almost opera-singer-like in the variety of notes he hits. Those songs are always the ones I think of when I think of Diorama, but maybe that's because they bookend the album so nicely - some stuff happens in between, but you start with a beautiful, grand song and end with another.
It's technically unrelated but I'll not get a chance to write about it elsewhere: I saw Silverchair on this tour and the set was much like the one captured on the Live From the Faraway Stables cd/dvd boxset - two halves, one of the grander songs and one of the heavier older songs. I was always surprised by how many of the songs from Diorama found their way into the second half because I'd never really considered it a heavy album. On the dvd in particular (because my memories of the show itself are pretty faint now - they didn't play anything from Frogstomp, but I sang along to every word of the songs from The Neon Ballroom), The Lever really shines. It's a great example of showing how you can take an easily over-looked late album track and turn it into the highlight of the night. I bet no one walking into that room did so thinking that The Lever would be the best bit of their night.
Anyway, when I saw this album was getting re-released I added it to a list of albums I should buy then forgot about it entirely. Only in December when I was browsing through Banquet did I see it and finally buy it. When I got home, it was one of the first albums I played from my haul that day - I knew it backwards, but I wanted to hear those songs soar on my fancy record player for the first time. That play started something of a resurgence for with this album, because it just sounded so fucking lovely. I've probably listened to it more in the last six months than I did in the 16 years before that.
Format: 12", numbered (#1184)
Tracks: 11
Cost: £22 new
Bought: Banquet Records, Kingston
When: 27/12/18
Colour: Yellow/green mix
Etching: none
mp3s: none
