Silverchair - Diorama

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

Silverchair - The Greatest View

The Greatest View is from Silverchair's fourth album, Diorama. I'd found an import copy of Diorama in Essential Music in Southampton sometime before it had a general UK release, which seemed to make me a lot of temporary friends at college as everyone was very keen to hear it. Sadly, Diorama wasn't as great as the first three Silverchair records but did mean that they finally played the UK, giving me a chance to see them.

The Greatest View starts off with a pretty heavy sounding guitar but quickly turns back to the softer sound they were playing around this time. Not a classic. The b-side contains two songs that didn't make it onto the album (which is more than twice the average number). Asylum is a nice-enough, piano-led song but, again, not what I really want from Silverchair. I do remember them playing it the time I saw them and thinking it was a nice treat for the small number of us in the crowd who had this import single. Pins and Needles has something Neon-Ballroom-y about it but with the added style of Diorama in places (yet also the lower quality production you often get with b-sides. I'm not quite sure how it can sound both over-produced and under-produced at once, but it does).

The strangest thing about this record is that the a-side plays at 45rpm but the b-side plays at 33rpm. I don't think I've ever started playing the b-side at the correct speed. This was particularly a chore during the golden years when I had my Rega turntable which required lifting the platter off to change the speed.

Format: 7"
Tracks: 3
Cost: £3 new
Bought: Record Fair, Southampton
When: 26/10/02
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: no

Silverchair - Frogstomp

The first three Silverchair albums are all excellent and it's pretty pleasing to finally have the first, Frogstomp, on vinyl. I've been listening to this album for more than half of my life, which isn't something I can say about very many albums yet; I was 14/15 when I first started properly getting into music so now that I'm approaching 30 it is something that's starting to be true for increasingly many records. It's a curious thing to dwell on, but it's strange thinking about all those younger versions of me sat there listening to Frogstomp.

Of course, it's also worth mentioning that Silverchair themselves were only 14/15 when they wrote this record (no post about Silverchair is complete unless the young age they started out is mentioned!). It's a well-known fact that they grew out of this album much faster than I did, so much so that the one time I saw them they didn't play a single song from Frogstomp. A friend who went to the second night of four London shows said they played Israel's Son, which made me pretty gutted I'd gone the night before. I didn't expect to hear many Frogstomp songs (it was a Neon Ballroom/Diorama-heavy set) but Israel's Son was all I was really after. It's an odd song, in the fact that there's not another Silverchair song that feels very much like it. They certainly didn't write any others that sounded quite so angry or urgent. In fact, Frogstomp sometimes feels like a single with 10 b-sides (maybe it's the way that the tracklisting shows Israel's Son in a slightly larger font - something that I always found strange).

Don't get me wrong though, there are some great songs on the rest of the album and, depending on the day, I might even say better songs, but Israel's Son was always the lead, the single, the song you put on mixtapes to show people quite how cool Silverchair were. Shade is an absolutely incredible song (and the one that I sometimes consider better) but I don't think I ever put it on a mixtape. Tomorrow, Madman and Leave Me Out were always highlights too.

This copy is from the second pressing (/1000) of the recent Shop Radio Cast reissue, which I picked up at their stall at Fest last year. They've done a pretty nice job on the whole thing, the etching on side D being a particularly lovely touch. The original vinyl copy (which I remember seeing a few times on eBay back in the day, but was out-priced even then) squeezed all the songs onto one disc, but they've made it a double here. As on the original vinyl, Blind has been included between Shade and Leave Me Out. Many years ago I bought the best-of compilation in order to hear Blind and the vocal-version of Madman (which wasn't as good) so I was already quite familiar with the song. My only complaint comes with regards to that song - listening to the LP you can tell that Blind has come from a different source and was mastered differently; it just doesn't sound right. The volume and the production drops, especially on the heavier parts. The compilation version sounds fine, but I can see how it might be tough to get it to match the sound of the rest of the album. I'd love to hear the original vinyl to see how it sounds there.

Otherwise, SRC have done an excellent job on the reissue. This copy is slightly different to most in that one of the centre labels has the wrong colour frog on it (apparently - I'm colour-blind so it's quite hard to tell what's the same colour and what isn't sometimes). Side C has the green frog that appeared on the centre-labels of the first press. This misprint version cost me $2 more than a regular version, which is basically the same (I'm pretty bad at treating US currency like Monopoly money). $2 at Fest is a can of PBR (minus the tip) so spending that on a slightly different version of an LP sounded fine to me. Whatsmore, it worked out to be £17, which is still about £5 cheaper than most LP's are over here these days anyway. It was the most expensive record I bought on that whole trip, but it was definitely worth it.

Format: Double 12", gatefold sleeve
Tracks: 12
Cost: £17 new
Bought: Fest Registration, Tampa
When: 29/10/13
Colour: Transparent orange
Etching: Picture of a frog on side D
mp3s: no

Silverchair - Neon Ballroom

It was my sister who introduced me to Silverchair; there were only a handful of bands she got into before I did when we were younger, but Silverchair was one of them. When I was 14 or 15 I went on holiday to America with my family and my sister bought a handful of cds, benefitting from the good exchange rate. In amongst them was Adrenaline by Deftones and the first three Silverchair albums - Frogstomp, Freak Show and Neon Ballroom. I went on to buy the other two albums they released, but in so many ways those first three are the classics. I loved how different each album was from the one before it (no doubt the huge musical changes were due to the young age they recorded Frogstomp at), but Neon Ballroom struck the perfect combination of the angst of the first two and the pomp of the final two.

The first half of the album is huge, and Emotion Sickness and Anthem for the Year 2000 sound incredible with the volume way up (I have the house to myself and I'm blasting this record). The second half isn't bad, but it doesn't have the huge songs of side 1. Black Tangled Heart and the almost-punk Satin Sheets were also favourites back in the day and still hold up fairly well now.

I picked this LP up in Selectadisc in Soho (before it became Sister-Ray) while I was passing through London on the way to Winchester from Lancaster. I had an hour to make my connection in Waterloo so figured I had time to swing by some record shops, which I did, just about (there's no guilt in rushing around London because everyone does it). I was amazed it was only £6. Even today copies are going for £20-£30 on eBay. It's in practically mint condition too (a slight mark on the sleeve and the inner isn't quite perfect). I'd been a fan for a long time so was pretty pleased to find it on vinyl.

I only saw Silverchair once, but it was incredible. I had tickets to see them in 2002 but Daniel was taken ill and the tour was cancelled. Luckily that meant I got priority booking when they rescheduled the dates for 2003 and got tickets for the first of four shows in Shepherd's Bush Empire. Unfortunately this show was the night before my maths A-level exam, but got away with going by telling my parents the exam was the day before. I passed (only just) and they still don't know to this day. The Live From Faraway Stables cd/dvd is a pretty good representation of the show I saw that night. We had no Frogstomp songs, but Emotion Sickness and Anthem pleased me plenty.


Format: 12", gatefold sleeve, inner
Tracks: 12
Cost: £6 second hand
Bought: Selectadisc, London
When: 06/10/04
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: no