Diorama: The Rainbow at the End of the Darkness

Foreword

Diorama (Eleven/Atlantic, 2002) by the Australian alternative rock band Silverchair (of "the water out of the tap is veeeeery HARD TO DRIIIIIIIIINK" fame) is an intriguing listen. Dare I say it, because of its then-novel approach to furthering the shape of alternative rock to come and laying future groundwork in a manner not too dissimilar to De-loused in the Comatorium, Rated R, and Origin of Symmetry, it's, in this author's opinion, one of the best albums ever made. With reinvigorated and increasingly complex songwriting from Daniel Johns and Ben Gillies, with some songs being written as far back as 1998 ("Without You," "The Lever"), and a plethora of orchestral additions from art pop innovator/the King of Acid Alliteration Van Dyke Parks, this album transforms itself from the album where the post-grunge boy band finished growing up into a genuinely exhilarating work of the New Prog subgenre. Through Johns and Gillies' more concise and less "direct from the journal of a disassociated middle-class white boy from Newcastle who just became a vegetarian and really loves You Am I and Pearl Jam" lyrics, some of which even take a more surrealistic approach ("The Greatest View," definitely "Tuna in the Brine"), one gets the sense that the band has finally embraced who they are. To this day, this and its predecessor Neon Ballroom, itself another formative work in New Prog albeit a bit more indebted to the post-grunge aesthetic Silverchair had established themselves as being the Aussie heirs to, are the two Silverchair albums anybody can readily pick up on vinyl. 

The release I have (the 2014 Music on Vinyl repress) uses the same source as the 2002 limited-run pressing (500 copies worldwide) released to the band's fan club (albeit without the gatefold), which is odd - at that time, vinyl pressings from major labels often suffered in quality due to a lack of record pressing plants - since the pressing itself sounds absolutely amazing despite side B being 28 minutes long (a no-no according to vinyl purists) and audible distortion being heard prominently on the hidden track. It even comes with a record sleeve noting this as a "classic album reissued." It's even been championed in several Australian and European publications, notably the Australian version of Rolling Stone, as one of the best Australian albums of all time, and on RateYourMusic, the site most known for introducing saxophonist/occasional video essayist Thom Avella to Qwerty100, an ABBA and metal fan who seems to hate anything /mu/ or RYM's userbase seems to champion. Knowing myself, I consider myself a connoisseur of the fine wines of Agnetha, Benny, Bjorn, and Anni-frid ("SOS" and "Dancing Queen" are two of my favorite songs ever), but maybe don't try to make potshots at Sleater-Kinney that can be boiled down to "lol lesbian band, gb2kitchen" and claiming that if John Coltrane were the exact same person as Dave Brubeck (who's really good, I promise you), he'd be hated because he's not a cool black Islamist or something, but that's beside the issue here.

In America, Diorama is seen as the album with "The Greatest View" on it. You know the one - the really uplifting song about how Daniel is bogged down and overanalyzed by the media that gets played in video games and got some minor play over here in 2007 because "Straight Lines" got a lot of play and alternative radio wasn't even gonna attempt to play "Reflections of a Sound" and "If You Keep Losing Sleep." It's one of the band's most cynical songs - and one of their most lyrically obtuse - but the fact that it didn't really do well on radio even after it was re-released in 2007 goes to show what Americans tend to think of Silverchair completing their metamorphosis. 

And friends, that's where our story begins...

Chapter One: The Thorn in Daniel's Side

If you ask any random person in America if they've heard of Silverchair, most of the time you'll get the answer of "who in the hell is Silverchair?"

Outside of that, if you ask people who listen to a bit of 1990s grunge, they'll often respond with "they're that band who made 'Tomorrow,' right?" And right you are - they are the band that tried so hard to discuss class disparity in between Eddie Vedder screaming at you to listen to your vinyl collection and Chris Cornell wanting the sun to collapse into a singularity just so we can all experience The Spaghettification . 

Sub-episode: My History with Silverchair and the Station that Fought for Them

Fun fact about "Tomorrow" that happens to relate to my experience with music: I had heard the song a hundred times when I was a kid. Didn't connect names to faces - the first real memories of Silverchair I had that didn't involve my dad screaming at my late mom for getting into a minor fender bender and me looking at that CD cover with the green frog on it to get my mind off of the fact that my home life was a mix of uneventful days and domestic violence were of me stumbling upon my cousin's copy of Neon Ballroom that he had stashed in between his dad's Lynyrd Skynyrd greatest hits CD (featuring the hit song "Working for MCA," which is an actual song, I kid you not) because he was too busy jamming out to Korn and Powerman 5000. I took a listen on the stereo system and heard two songs that piqued my interest - "Emotion Sickness" and "Ana's Song (Open Fire)." Combined with me not remembering anything from my dad's copy of Frogstomp (mostly because at that time, me and my siblings were listening to TLC and Alanis Morissette) and the more subdued sound of those select songs, I didn't immediately recognize "Tomorrow" to Silverchair until the radio DJs on the local alternative station said it was. And then it clicked - Daniel's voice on "Ana's Song" was kinda similar to his Eddie Vedder/Kurt Cobain impression on "Tomorrow."

Around 2007, before the station was forced to shut down due to changing market demographics and years of absurd mismanagement - my favorite DJ from the station, Sean Demery (who sadly passed away on September 15 due to complications of a stroke which left him totally paralyzed, as I found out while writing), wrote an excellent run-down on the whole thing - the station held their 15th anniversary. And I was turned in. Not only were all the original DJs there, they also regaled tales of all the acts they helped promote throughout the station's lifespan. One of them, former program director Brian Phillips, talked about the time that he went to Australia in early 1995. As he was a program director, he brought back some CDs - a bit of Midnight Oil, some Crowded House, a dash of You Am I, and an EP by this really strong grunge band comprised entirely of 15-year-olds. One of the songs was added to the playlist, which started to get the band a lot of traction due to this station's massive influence at the time. This song ended up getting picked up by several stations in the format, even going as far as ensuring an American release for the debut album by the grunge boy band - and the day after it hit the streets, Silverchair played their first American show in Atlanta.

Until the bitter end, 99X kept promoting Silverchair, playing their deeper cuts from all their albums and helping push "Straight Lines" and "The Greatest View" onto the charts despite the band being passé over here. With the recontextualization of the station's Cerberus syndrome - promoting new acts and cutting-edge music one minute, spamming the oldies of the '90s the next - it makes me think what if Sean and company desperately wanted to break the other singles from the criminally underrated (even by Silverchair fans, fairweather and devoted alike) Young Modern since they had a sound more in line with what alternative and indie acts were coming out with at the time, but were forced to find something in line with the station's flip-flop aesthetic, thus why "The Greatest View," a song more similar to the Silverchair songs that got radio play in the '90s than the prog-pop and neo-psychedelia of Young Modern, got chosen as the next radio single and not "Reflections of a Sound."

(end subepisode)

We can all agree that "Tomorrow" is lyrically not a good song. It's an excellent exercise in figuring out how to write an effective instrumental, but outside of that, that's all what the song's got going for it. Daniel's observations on class disparity - taking the form of a dialectic between a millionaire and somebody in poverty - come across as accidentally shallow. I know that wasn't the intent - Daniel had a strong grasp at creating narrative-driven lyrics even as early as Frogstomp, as evidenced by "Israel's Son" and "Faultline" - but he was so new to the idea of talking about something that affects people on a daily basis that he didn't bother to think about how he, a middle-class teenager living a relatively comfortable life, would communicate the song. It appears simple - yes, they're the observations of a teenager who's just learning to be political and yes, "Tomorrow" is leagues less blunt than songs like "Spawn Again" which outright act as political statements - which, alongside the meteoric rise of the band, helped create the notion that this band was anything but authentic or heartfelt. Music critics began tearing them apart for this belief that they were just using and abusing the tried-and-true grunge formula like a lot of the fly-by-night artists that began popping up in wake of Kurt Cobain's death.

Spin Magazine called this phenomenon "scrunge," or soundalike fake grunge, in their November 1995 issue. Scrunge was supposed to be, to paraphrase the magazine, a Taco Bell advertisement's co-opting of their music as mere "dinner music" for those edgy Gen X'ers and early Millennials who want their fast-food enchiritos. Basically, commercial grunge for consumers of commercial Tex-Mex cuisine. Bands like Bush and Sponge fit the mold to a T, having ironed out their flaws and focus-grouped to death to make a bigger impact on radio, but some of the other choices are baffling, even by the metrics of 1990s sarcasm. Bands like Tripping Daisy, Collective Soul, Hum, fucking Garbage, and Weezer were put under the category despite being far from grunge outside of the cherry-picked (and popular) singles Spin focused on. Tripping Daisy are a highly unsung neo-psych group as early as Bill and had begun to embrace their prog tendencies on their 1995 album I Am an Elastic Firecracker, itself another candidate for one of these overlong essays. Hum were a space rock band in the same way Failure was. Weezer were power pop. Collective Soul were a general hard rock band who played songs in minor keys. And Garbage - why in the fuck is Garbage on the list? It destroys the joke! They were always a more electronic and dance-oriented act than anybody else! It's like putting Portishead on the list because "Sour Times" got some radio play over here!

Oh, wait, it's because Butch Vig created them. Oh, well. Whatever. Never mind.

Of course Silverchair made the list - after all, "Tomorrow" is a pretty much the Taco Bell of Pearl Jam (who were once considered the Taco Bell of Nirvana for some reason, but became cool once the Ticketmaster boycott and Vitalogy - oooh, another candidate for future essays! - went on everybody's radars), even down to Eddie Vedder's increased political slant in his lyrics by co-opted by Daniel Johns. However, the fact that "Faultline," "Israel's Son," "Cicada," and even the super-weak-and-misfired-even-by-Frogstomp-standards "Suicidal Dream" all inhabited that same space and seemed to come from a place of genuine frustration negates the idea that "Tomorrow" is the nefariously-corporate-but-inept version of something off of Vs. - it rubs me in the same way that something like the total embrace of the super-strong-and-dangerous leftie and the NPC meme does. Like, Silverchair are super-calculated and cynically created to make something like New Kids on the Block but with lyrics about all the important issues about why growing up is like a civil war, but they're also really bad at their jobs, thus leading twentysomethings and alt-rock critics to justify why they don't like the fact that a super-photogenic and radio-friendly answer to Pearl Jam is getting all the radio play. Basically, "orange man fat boy bad, he wait until tomorrow," lather, rinse, obey, mate, feed, kill, repeat.

There are negative effects to Spin's coining of scrunge - and not just in the way that it only served to intensify rockist attitudes in the alt-rock scene and about created the inevitable backlash to nu metal when it started to fade out in 2001-02. The main one is that a lot of the bands they wrote off as scrunge often had follow-ups that were left unnoticed since TRUE and HONEST Smart Rational People (TM) like the friendly folks at Spin had cracked the code, thus helping bury a lot of these albums or, at the very least, lower their chances at radio play with each successive album. Garbage managed to avoid all of this because...

1. Shirley Manson is really awesome and you should check out Garbage, and

2. Garbage 2.0 didn't come out until 1998 and really dug into the electronica and trip-hop elements more than the self-titled did.

Collective Soul didn't give a damn. They powered on - Ed and Dean Roland kept writing super-catchy and hook-heavy songs, both with hard-hitting elements and classic post-grunge elements, often showing off how diverse they could be not only with their songwriting (by introducing tons of neo-psych and power pop elements) but with the fact that they knew how to write some really complex songs for the genre. Not bad for the band whose first album is literally just Ed Roland's songwriting demo that Atlantic thought was good. No, really, Hints, Allegations, and Things Left Unsaid is largely boring and, production-wise, unlistenable as an artistic statement and not just a showcase of Ed's songwriting. The real genius of the band starts with their actual debut, Collective Soul, showcasing a more congealed band ready to take on the world they know.

But Weezer didn't. The year following the coining of "scrunge," Weezer came out with this super-confessional (and super-creepy at times) album, Pinkerton. It's a really good album in my opinion - probably the closest blueprint for emo-pop alongside looser-fit candidates Nothing Feels Good by the Promise Ring and The Lonesome Crowded West by Orange Julius VIP members Modest Mouse - and back then, it was seen as pretty bad. Like, the furthest thing from acceptable - and not just in the "Rivers Cuomo makes his character way too sympathetic and self-flagellating on 'Across the Sea' after confessing to wanting to sniff the underwear of an 18-year-old Japanese fan" way either. I mean in the "this album stinks" way - the only publications willing to defend it as something other than okay at best were Entertainment Weekly, New Musical Express, and some online site by the name of Pitchfork, who criticized the sexism of the album (and there's tons of it) but noted that Rivers was at the top of his songwriting game here. Apparently people cracked the Weezer code and got tired - so tired, they're tired - of having the melodies of Weezer stay in their tried-and-true power pop aesthetic but with more minor chords and tons of casual sexism thrown in.

Hum and Tripping Daisy got less, their follow-up albums to their commercial breakthroughs being largely ignored by listeners to the point where they began suffering internal problems. Hum broke up due to diminishing returns - a tragedy since Downward is Heavenward is a really great album in the same way You'd Prefer an Astronaut is - but, boy oh boy, Tripping Daisy got it worse. Not only did the follow-up to I Am an Elastic Firecracker, the excellent Jesus Hits Like the Atom Bomb, flop to the point of them getting dropped from their label during the big Seagram music company reshuffling of 1999 (alongside Interscope signees The Dismemberment Plan, Rocket from the Crypt, and The Reverend Horton Heat, the favorite band of your dad who's into Kustom Kulture and rockabilly), their lead guitarist Wes Berggren died of a drug overdose that same year, pretty much ensuring that after Tim DeLaughter gets their then-next album finished, he's pretty much ending the band. Of course he, Mark Pirro, and Bryan Wakeland (along with former drummer Jeff Bouck) formed the Polyphonic Spree, partially to make sense of Wes' death but mostly because Tripping Daisy's sound was starting to lead in that direction.

But Silverchair - they seemed to have it good for a while. Their follow-up to Frogstomp, Freak Show, came out in 1997 and seemed to get a decent amount of radio play, albeit without that true runaway smash that "Tomorrow" was. To most people, it was more of the same (but with darker, edgier, and/or weirder lyrics), but looking back, especially in context of what would come after it, it's the beginning of Silverchair's maturation. Sure, they're still those same Pearl Jam-worshipping kiddos who think they're deeper than everybody else in the room because they sing songs about the real issues, unlike those people who don't write pop songs for us rejects, plus Daniel Johns is a vegetarian now, so that's gotta count for something, right? But - and I mean "but" - at the end of the day, Silverchair are showing a genuine interest in writing songs in the pop format. Not only are "Cemetary" and "Petrol and Chlorine" nice changes of pace from the same-old-same-old barrage of electric guitar and hard-hitting hooks Frogstomp rains down on you, implementing acoustic formats, songs like "The Door," "Pop Song for Us Rejects," and "The Closing" show that the band can make some good, if pretty heavy, power pop. And not only that, their post-grunge hooks are getting really damn good around this time - unlike Frogstomp, I often come back to Freak Show. It's to Silverchair what Fly by Night is to Rush - it's still a no-frills-no-bullshit super-stupid hit-it-and-quit-it sort of album with its immediacy and sometimes juvenile nature, but you get the feeling that Daniel feels a bit more at home here, especially with him starting to experiment with other modes of songwriting.

And then comes Neon Ballroom. While "Anthem for the Year 2000" and "Ana's Song (Open Fire)" charted over here, it didn't seem to do as well as the first two. Although the band had further developed their experimental tendencies, improving on Freak Show with studio orchestras and poppier songwriting (evidenced on the songs "Miss You Love" and "Paint Pastel Princess," both excellent), people seemed to gravitate around the songs with that same aggro and youthful-woke energy that "Tomorrow" possessed, which is why, for some reason, a largely acoustic art-grunge song about Daniel's struggle with anorexia got quite a bit of radio play in America. Outside of those two, nobody seemed to care about the album - hell, my cousin would really only play "Anthem" if I ever made him pop the CD on. I preferred "Emotion Sickness" and "Ana's Song" - well, until 2003, when "Anthem" clicked for me and I actually took the serious album as more than just "catchy song about eating disorders with other songs that have actual big orchestras and stuff." Maybe I was in the mood for songs opposing fascism after reading The Devil's Arithmetic and Number the Stars. Maybe it's because it was another cool song for me to talk to Rachel about since she found "The Hurdy Gurdy Man" to be super-annoying. Maybe it's because my cousin finally convinced me that Silverchair could ROCK.

But enough of that - Neon Ballroom is its own essay for another day - we've come back full circle to where I first began to really notice this band that I had heard about for most of my childhood. After starting to get super-interested in them thanks to the Neon Ballroom tracks, I decided to look them up on the Internet - see if they had an official website. And they did - and it was promoting this new album of theirs called Diorama. They were playing snippets from the album - I think they were "Without You" and "The Greatest View," to the best of my memory - and, to be honest, I was starting to get into heavier bands at the time. Thanks to my budding interest in Gran Turismo, the world's best series of RPGs with some racing thrown in, I had heard about this band called Grinspoon thanks to their hit song "Champion." I began listening to Green Day a lot because I fell in love with "When I Come Around" and Billie Joe's looks. I stopped listening to Aerosmith for a hot minute because first boy crush Steven Tyler appeared barefoot in a couple of music videos and also I kinda got teased for liking them. Hell, I took a liking to Modest Mouse because I stumbled upon their music video for "Float On" when that aired on MTV - hell, I remember the local Publix selling copies of The Moon and Antarctica around the time "Float On" became a thing. And "Float On" wasn't even on that album. And there's Relient K, thanks to the youth group spamming "Sadie Hawkins Dance" and "For the Moments I Feel Faint" at least 20 times every Wednesday and Sunday - MMHMM up to Forget and Not Slow Down are good essay material as well. And INXS - I even wrote a cringey Code: Lyoko fanfic where Lance Vance and JD Fortune (you know, from that INXS reality show competition) murder Michael Hutchence because I wanted to be edgy and cutting-edge and (Velma Kelly voice) all that jazz and like Lance Vance was put in a supercomputer by Franz Hopper or something, I dunno.

So, yeah, by the time I really came back around to Diorama, Young Modern had already come and gone on the radio. I heard "The Greatest View," but the chord progression in the refrain made me feel extremely sad, so I decided to play it safe and listen to an entire album about missed opportunities and drug addiction. And THAT is one of those albums that I'm glad people are finally coming around on - Blind Melon's Soup, with its blueprint for a Southern art rock movement that never came to be, is really good. Stop reading this and listen to it now. If you're listening to Diorama, pause that for a second and play Soup. I ensure you - it's really, really good.

But if you're over here, screaming for your glass of Silverchair-flavored lemonade and complaining about too much, too much...too much esoteric references to song lyrics, I'll finish up this section by saying that no wonder why Daniel thought so little of the song that got him to where he is. Not only is it his greatest blessing, it's his greatest curse. People think of him as nothing more than the teenager who - bless his heart - thought he could talk about all the Marxist issues in a big rock song. But if it weren't for that dumb little song by that dumb high school band, he wouldn't have been able to make those three albums that are ultimately worth it, especially that one in the middle. The one with the ajar door bleeding out all that precious expensive rainbow.

Chapter Two: Diorama is Genius and Here's Why

Now here's the part where I actually talk about the album rather than a loose word vomit of anecdotes, song lyric jokes, unintended eulogies to radio DJs I listened to when I was a teenager, and promises to talk about the album that has "I Got a Girl" on it. I did a mini-review at the beginning, but that's more a summary of the whole thing. People give summaries all the time. I want to talk about why this album is good - what makes it impactful - and why I paid $25 to get somebody in Illinois to ship a copy of the 2014 repress to me. I want to talk about why I feel so compelled to defend the teenage knights of scrunge. And ultimately, I wanna talk about why Young Modern is so good as well since I've been hyping it up as well.

Diorama is good because it actually gives a damn about what it wants to be. A lot of big experimental albums from otherwise mainstream acts tend to have this habit of being extremely by-the-numbers even by the merit of the descriptor alone - experimental music is supposed to be experimental. It's supposed to by the final frontier of what you can do as an established artist. It's not meant to be the dumping grounds for, say, Eddie Murphy to write a bunch of flaccid New Jack Swing and get Michael Jackson as a feature on one of his songs because, hey, remember "Party All the Time"? It's not supposed to be Nickelback writing a disco-grunge song where Chad Kroeger talks about drinking Coke or something, I dunno. Like, there's this stigma against the established band's experimental album to where most people think "oh, it's gonna sound bad" when they hear that the band really tried to be eclectic with this new one. Diorama entirely avoids that problem - not only do the experiments mesh together well (they've been introduced as early as Freak Show and made part of the official Silverchair sound on Neon Ballroom), Daniel's songwriting in general manages to help convey a lot of these ideas effectively.

In prior years, the team of Johns and Gillies often wrote songs that aimed for the jugular. They aimed for the hardest hitting material with the most potential for impact. This often leads their songs to be rather blunt, to say the least - a lot of the songs on Frogstomp and Freak Show often state their intention as clear as day. And to be honest, a lyric like "you're the analyst - the fungus in my milk. When you've got no one, then you've got someone" wouldn't exactly sell in 1997, not in a climate where impressionistic lyricism often gets labeled as novelty or is completely overshadowed by something a bit more blunt. The Flaming Lips are a really good example of this sort of thing happening - none of the songs off of their album and essay candidate Clouds Taste Metallic, which is what is birthed when one gets The Soft Bulletin in their Transmissions from the Satellite Heart, got a lot of radio play outside of the occasional play of "This Here Giraffe" during late nights and on college stations. However, Korn's album Life is Peachy (say it with me: another essay candidate) got radio play all over the place, albeit late at night because safe harbor hours and all, because it's so direct and forceful with you. Clouds, on the other hand, is obtuse and oddball. It's quirky. And honestly, it's like comparing apples with baked potatoes here - both are great in their own unique ways (Korn's approach to aggro music is pretty much perfected on Peachy, especially on songs like "A.D.I.D.A.S.," "Good God," and "No Place to Hide" where Jonathan Davis' approach to lyricism is bettered by him not trying to rap for once in his life and where Munky and Head have this really great approach to the interlocking guitar parts that about dives headfirst into avant-garde; the Lips' quirkiness on Clouds is less cloying than it is on Satellite Heart and loads more professional than Hit to Death in the Future Head, especially with how they rely less on shock value and random bits of oddball stylings and focus more on creating lyrical and sonic images that stay with you, especially when enhanced by Wayne Coyne's admittedly really weak ability to sing), but it says something that Life is Peachy went gold three months after it was released while getting little to no mainstream domestic radio play whereas the commercial failure of Clouds Taste Metallic about convinced the Lips to give up the whole "making mainstream head music" thing and focus instead on writing weirder Beach Boys albums about fighting pink robots and curing diseases.

But starting on Neon Ballroom, Daniel's lyrics began to get really impressionistic. And not in the expected "he's gonna rip off Cobain's approach to impressionism and abstraction" way either - whereas Cobain found himself preoccupied with issues of gender identity, sexism, and systemic abuse (dating Tobi Vail and hanging out with Kathleen Hanna really paid off), Daniel kept to his tried-and-true fascinations with social justice, animal liberation, pacifism, and being an outsider in a world that's already written him off as the Del Taco of grunge, but with an abstraction that takes more cues from Wayne Coyne than from Cobain's focus on religious iconography and female anatomy. Daniel writes entire abstract wordscapes that paint surrealist nightmares, where the logic of the universe is thrown on its head because thanks to our factory farming and our inability to seemingly try to make the meat industry not try to overheat the entire planet much to the pleasure of famed Republican voter The Ocean, we're training bovine soldiers to become a delicious and buttery-smooth Flo's Filet. It outright compares our habit of eating meat and all those people to get really upset when somebody tells them that they're vegan because something something "oh no they're gonna tell me that eating meat is immoral and *gasp* they might convince me!" to the unjustified and unneeded devastations of war. And not only that, since said song started out as a tie-in song for the 1997 movie Spawn, it makes us contextualize the feedback loop of pain Spawn finds himself in in order to "redeem" himself as a feedback loop of us justifying our self-destructive tendencies despite the consequences popping up in larger quantities than before. And this is just one song.

Go to something like "Ana's Song," an admittedly less politically-involved song (but still related to the theme of self-destruction prevalent on Neon Ballroom and kinda tied into Daniel's own experiences with his vegetarian/vegan diet at the time) which takes the frame of a one-sided relationship that only serves to destroy all involved, to strip them down to the bones. And rather than do anything about it - i.e. get treatment for the body integrity issues - Daniel's abused character instead justifies the relationship as a well-intentioned love despite him damn well knowing Ana's wrecking his life - after all, she makes the sound of laughter and sharpened nails seem softer. This is all too familiar with how survivors and victims of abuse contextualize their relationships with abusers - that they make the world better. That without them, they are nothing. That it's alright when Ike Turner slaps you in the face and makes you eat an entire cake because he's your guardian, he's your carer, he knows what's best. If you want a song that frankly discusses issues of abuse, "Ana's Song" is a really good choice due to how, and this is important, Daniel makes the issue universal. Rather than simply dwell on how anorexia has turned him into a nervous husk waiting to die, Daniel's choice to compare his reliance and justification for his anorexia to the way abuse survivors justified being with monsters and terrible people makes what should be an extremely narrowly-focused into something of a more relatable tragedy.  It not only makes the song hard to listen to, it actually makes it cathartic - if he's singing this song, he's already survived. He's stopped letting Ana control him. He's walked away from Ike. And he's gonna tell you how his abuser abused him without mincing a single fucking word.

Diorama intensifies all of these elements. Not only do the songs get more personal, they get even more abstract AND even more relatable. Take for example "The Greatest View," a song that is ostensibly about the way Daniel was treated by the media in both America (the judgmental side) and Australia (the more tabloid-y side). He cites the media as nothing more than something spoiling his milk - something making his daily life a slog to get through and his joie de vivre nonexistent. And their persistence to try to cover every little thing he does, even when nobody gives a damn, is what scares him the most - the fact that they're that devoted to dehumanizing the celebrity into nothing more than a living curio since people live vicariously through people more famous than they are is kinda frightening to public personalities who strive to have something resembling normalcy and a private life. But at the end of the day, while the media scares Daniel, he has the higher ground - he has the normalcy. He has the context to every single thing he does. He knows the things they don't. In other words, he's got the greatest view watching them, watching him.

"The Greatest View" could easily as well be another "paparazzi bad" song where the songwriter turns themselves into the victim and tends to stay that way since tragedy sells, but instead of going for a more pessimistic affair, Daniel instead approaches the song with optimism. Yes, the media is a pain. Yes, the paparazzi are annoying, but at the end of the day, they will go away. And not only that, they won't know the real you whereas the people who understand you and your need for privacy do. And at the end of the day, who cares if a bunch of rock critics rag on some album that three high schoolers made because their after-school band got somewhat popular just because they think it's corporate? Daniel Johns doesn't care because, even though he's super-embarrassed by Frogstomp and Freak Show - even beginning to refer to them as "skeletons in the closet" around the time Diorama came out - he's still glad that they started his career and helped him on his path of becoming a better songwriter. It personally doesn't affect him if he got called scrunge by Rolling Stone But For Cool Alternative and Indie Kids - as long as he has the ability to do what he loves, he's got the greatest view over the writers at Spin who thought it'd be a good look to rag on a band of kids because their famous song was corny.

I mean, one could call "The Greatest View" pretty petty since it can fit under the umbrella of "I'm totally over being called a loser, I'm gonna remind people that I'm over it." However, Daniel approaches the concept from a clearer head than just trying to convince himself he's cool - it's rather him telling others that they shouldn't be so petty themselves. And that song's full of people laughing at really hot sand dunes and packing up a pair of Hobbit feet for the winter months.

This sets in stage for one of the big themes of Diorama: acceptance and moving on. After the exploration of self-destruction on Neon Ballroom, Daniel demoed eight songs for the then-untitled upcoming album before deleting them after realizing that he just wrote another set of dark songs. And Silverchair had become known for being a bit dark and edgy, so rather than dwell on all that negative energy, Daniel instead decided to write songs about being positive to some degree. About healthy relationships, about usefulness, about longing, about being a better person - in other words, the anti-Neon Ballroom.  And of course, after getting over one malady - homewrecker Ana - and developing another as soon as you start to record the album, you'd want to be positive. Picture this: you're 21-22 and your joints are locking up harder than usual. You're in more pain than you want to ever be. You want to make another soul-crushingly depressing album about how we're all doom to destroy ourselves thanks to our hubris? No! You want to lift people up...because you want to lift yourself up. You want to justify working through the pain, so you strive to leave a positive impact on everybody. If you're feeling down - and trust me, you would if you didn't have a lot of hand dexterity thanks to all this arthritis - you want people to know that if they've been there, you feel for them because, by God, you've been there too. We all experience this - maybe not the arthritis or the paparazzi or the anorexia or the one-hit wonder status in America - but we know what it's like to feel left out, to feel underutilized, to be at your lowest fucking point. And Daniel comes around, extends his arms our, and tells you that it's okay, that you're gonna get through this because he got through this. He's your shoulder to cry upon.

And you can't fake that level of empathy, not even if you're super-corporate and you know all the pathways. Taco Bell can't make an authentic Mexican meal in a corporate setting - they're good for their awesome Double Chalupa Boxes and their Mountain Dew Baja Blast - and Del Taco has that Bun Taco that's pretty damn tasty, but if I want authentic Mexican food, I will go to one of the mom-and-pop Mexican joints near me. Sure, it's not True Authentic Mexican Food (TM) in the way my grandfather's experienced it that one time when he was in Texas, but for MOR Tex-Mex, there's more soul in even a screwed-up taco than any $5 box with a really big chalupa inside could ever grant me. I know these people care about their cooking - I know they give a shit about their craft. Hell, they even have street tacos now. Street tacos - the tacos I only heard about in dreams. The local Mexican joints have them - and they're so delicious! Taco Bell doesn't have street tacos - they have chicken taquitos with ranch with some Taco Bell hot taco sauce thrown in. And even then, they're LTO, so go get your "rolled chicken tacos" fast. Diorama is like really good local Mexican food.

I recommend this place called Tello's Mexican Grill if you're ever in Mystic Falls. Awesome food, friendly staff, good specials, killer fajitas and street tacos - and all at an accessible price point. If you're tired of Taco Bell or Del Taco, try that one. It might not be the most authentic or the most down-to-Earth, but it's really good local food that breaks up the monotony of eating the same-old fried Southern goodies at the Mystic Grill.

Now that I have that out of the way, let's talk about why the album is great instrumentally. Not only have the band improved considerably on their instruments - Ben's drumming is less powering through the beats and tastefully adding necessary rhythms and flairs to the soundscape; Chris Joannou's bass is a lot more active than just doubling Daniel's drop-D power chords, and Daniel - oh, boy, Daniel shows he can play a lot more than a downtuned guitar. Diorama is the first album of his where he composed the entire thing on piano. And it shows. Not only are the songs much more complex in terms of structure and melodic qualities, the out-and-about rockers ("The Greatest View," "One Way Mule," "The Lever") have more moving parts than anything from Frogstomp, Freak Show, or similar tracks from Neon Ballroom. The songs weren't just made to have the band rock out on stage, but to accurately convey what Daniel wanted to communicate in his narratives - and for the most part, given the most optimistic approach to the lyricism, the songs are primarily in major keys and possess this grandiose scale that Neon Ballroom didn't really possess much of. Even "One Way Mule," as crushing and heavy as that song can be at times, is this tonally uplifting ditty with a myriad of chord changes - and it's played in drop-C, from what I can gather. These songs have a lot more going on - and thanks to that, when I strum something like "The Greatest View" on my department-store acoustic, I don't get that full-bodied sound Daniel and co. honed.

And not only that, he overlays keyboard-controlled instruments when the effect need be - for example, he implements a harpsichord on "Across the Night," adds piano during the refrain of "The Greatest View," and assisted with the orchestral arrangements on the songs Larry Muhoberac arranged, keeping them in line with the established sunshiney aesthetic Van Dyke Parks arranged on "Across the Night" and "Tuna in the Brine" while also taking on a unique quality - that of a more Neon Ballroom-y hard art rock aesthetic.

Tonally, the closest thing this album sounds to is the prior album, Neon Ballroom, with its adherence to the post-grunge aesthetic and not shying away from the traditional Silverchair fare of heavy metal-esque post-grunge, but tonally and lyrically, it's a close fit to Silverchair's final album before their "indefinite hibernation" in 2011, Young Modern. Not only does that album deal with more optimistic lyricism while also dealing with dark personal experiences - i.e. writing several songs about insomnia and sleep deprivation - it fully embraces Van Dyke Parks' art pop aesthetic and about throws away most out-and-about rockers save for "Mind Reader" and "Insomnia." Every song is full to the brim with chipper keyboards and increasingly confident piano work from Daniel - and that's not to say that Chris and Ben are becoming experts at their instruments as well, featuring more lead-bass work similar to Geddy Lee at times and more creative drum rhythms similar to what Ringo Starr was coming up with during the later years of the Beatles. It's a noticeably more Beatlesque album to Diorama's approach of being a prog-rock album with grunge tendencies - again, not only with throwing away guitar-driven songs and focusing on Daniel's keyboards, helping augment the art pop sound; but also with how Daniel has totally embraced writing pop songs. He's not writing for the critics anymore - he's writing for you and me, with songs that have prominent hooks even with all their twists and turns. Hell, there's a 7-minute epic, "Those Thieving Birds/Strange Behaviour/Those Thieving Birds (Part 2)," which combines two songs - one somewhat incomplete and the other all the way done - and combines them together, augmenting them to create something like the "Happiness is a Warm Gun" pastiches of bygone days but approaching it from another angle than just "let's just dump a bunch of incomplete songs into one place and link them together."  And it's full of hooks, not only in the "Thieving Birds" sections, but all throughout "Strange Behaviour," itself an excellently-crafted song and a candidate for US-only single that legacy modern rock stations totally ignored in favor of playing "Tomorrow" again.

Overall, I really recommend Diorama and Young Modern, as they both show the band at their peak of their artistic renaissance in radically different ways, but there's one thing on my mind. And that's...

Chapter Three: Why Defend Silverchair?

I love novelty acts. I love flash-in-the-pan one-hit wonders. I love Brad Roberts' rich baritone in the Crash Test Dummies. I love Neil Finn's knack for quirky New Wavey pop in post-Phil Judd Split Enz. I love the energetic abandon of Chumbawamba, both anarcho-punk and dance-punk eras. I love "Right Here Right Now" by Jesus Jones, as much as a naive joke that song can be at times. I love how silly and devoted to the concept "Hobo Humpin' Slobo Babe" by Whale is. Hell, I love that Hanson are the inheritors to the grand power pop tradition and keep on doing what they love. But why defend the band that made "Tomorrow," especially after chewing out that song for its immaturity and accidentally corporate nature? Why chew out the writers at Spin who didn't know any better and only had the experiences of the past 10 years in modern rock to judge why they didn't like Hum's "Stars" or "Good" by Better Than Ezra (an underrated alt-country band with solid power pop chops)? Why hype up this band as more than what they're worth? Why compare them to seminal New Prog and early 2000s modern rock releases? Why Silverchair?

Because Silverchair means so much to me.

I was a kid when I first heard about Silverchair - my dad having the Frogstomp CD, my cousin having Neon Ballroom - and I liked them. Something about their songs made sense to me - sure, I heard more concise lyrics from other acts I listened to at the time, especially Chumbawamba, but even though I knew Daniel was going through some really obvious growing pains on tape with his ever-evolving tenor going from prepubescent Eddie Vedder to a more dynamic and natural set of pipes, I kept with this band. Even after I read the negative reviews of Young Modern and began listening to more than just Silverchair because "I'm too old for them" (thanks, PopMatters), I still went back to my Australian friends. And even after the 2011 break-up in all but name killed my hopes of listening to their in-progress upcoming album, I still stuck by them. Even as I began to struggle with my own insecurities, doubling down on desperate attempts at looking cool by either listening to increasingly esoteric works or by rejecting albums I liked because critics said they weren't cool or because members of RateYourMusic said they weren't cool, I couldn't give up Silverchair. Even as I began to realize my own sexuality and how my desperate attempts at looking as straight as possible burned bridges I wish I had never burned, Daniel's lyrics helped me through the hard times. Sure, they made me realize that what I did was wrong, but they also said that as long as you're bettering yourself and trying to be a better person to others, all will be right at the end of the day. It does get better - ask the ex-husband of Natalie Imbruglia with the arthritis, the anorexia, and the block regarding him wanting to finish his band's last statement. If he can get on with his life and make more music that teaches us to learn from our mistakes and let go of the things that hold us back, then so can we.

And you don't get a lot of those types of albums that teach that in the rock canon. You get a few scattered songs here and there - "Getting Better" by the Beatles is one of my favorite ones - but not an entire album. Especially not an album you're banking on to further your success into the 2000s and radically redefines your image.

There are a lot of people I mistreated or acted terribly to. There's Rachel, from the Nanette essay/review. There's the admin of that Spyro page on Facebook. There's some friends of mine from Florida (mostly involved in the voice-acting community) that I've about alienated. There's even people I didn't even know and who were just uninvolved friends of my bullies. And I always acted like they were out to get me - that Rachel screwed me over because she didn't like Cardiacs or the Toadies or saw that I was trying to rekindle the little bit of romance that I saw as our apex. That the admin was out to get me because I didn't see eye-to-eye with them on a misguided ethical movement that they were pretty conflicted about at the end of the day - and that I reminded them of their own missteps like they were weights upon their shoulders. That those voice-actor friends were out to make me look like a profane prude, especially at a time that my deceased aunt got so insulted at me sharing an out-of-context clip from 21 Jump Street that she told her brother (my grandfather) about my rebellious streak. That the uninvolved person had to be watched over like a hawk in case she was covertly planning to do something even worse than raiding a page of mine that I didn't administrate all that much back in 2013.

It's not easy to admit that I've been a terrible person to a handful of people. It's not easy to come to terms with the fact that they'll never want to talk to you again over what you've done. And it can feel like that - the same weight you put on their shoulders for considering you some obligation to either protect or write off as a "creepy asshole" gets put on you. And yeah, I'll admit that the burden of the weight can get to me to the point where I've thought about taking my final bow and going off into the bitter rainy night. And yeah, I can come into that, feeling like I deserve it, especially after making other people feel unwelcome in this great big world. It's easy to think that I'm doomed to self-destruction, becoming the homewrecker Ana herself.

But I know things can get better. Sure, that doesn't mean that every person that I've ever alienated has to lower their shields and resume friendly conversation like the past few years were just a game - their decision is their decision and I have no say in that - but as for me, I can't just dwell on the fact that a few people don't like me and leave it at that. I'm not bound to my fate like Dylan Maxwell, not learning his lesson and instead coming out of his ordeal with "I will always be the dumb class clown, forever mediocre." I can be better than that. And I know I can be better than that - hell, I've had fallings-out that were relatively brief that I've rebounded from. I just do and act better and try to make a positive influence that way. I don't need the validation of me getting back former friends, but I do have to learn from my mistakes regarding how I acted towards them.

And you wanna know who taught me that - who taught me that the darkness, as long as you try to be a better person and learn from your past actions, is merely temporary? It wasn't John or Paul, nor was it Win and Régine. It was Daniel Johns. His little prog-rock album with some post-grunge thrown in gave me some much-needed life lessons. Diorama is an emotional and powerful affair that doesn't just aim for taking another picture of the darkness, nor leave you with "always look on the bright side of life" and similar empty affirmations - Silverchair painted a portrait of a world that, yes, can suck the life out of you, but at the end of the day, if you're up to the task and willing to self-criticize what you've done, things will get better. And you can't mass-produce that, Spin Magazine.

A+

Afterword

I'm still emotionally wiped out from the conclusion, but to switch topics, I've been hearing about this band called Greta Van Fleet who've been hated with such an immense fervor. They're a classic rock throwback band with tons of Zeppelin influence, even down to the clothing, and people have been calling them the worst thing that's happened to rock music, especially since their debut Anthem of the Peaceful Army came out back in October. They've been called all sorts of things - formulaic, derivative, ripoff artists, but most disturbingly, corporately manufactured. And most of those things are right - the album is by-the-numbers, the album is derivative, the album wears its influences on its sleeve and only its influences, the album feels deader than "Highway Song" and "Safari Song" did when they first made their impact on radio back in 2017. But to just give up hope for this band, especially after them starting their learning process to write a compelling album (and even introducing progressive rock elements into their music), in order to make a hot take about how they're just the corporate cog of the week reminds me way too much of Silverchair being labeled scrunge back in their early days. And not only that, Spin Magazine and Pitchfork - the leaders of the cries of corporate puppeteering - are considered alternatives to mainstream publications.  They're damning the band to get ignored even when they eventually innovate and change up elements of the sound, be it on the follow-up or the one after that.

I know the Kiszka brothers are capable of making music that can connect to everybody. Hell, "Highway Song" is a pretty rollicking tune - and they got this far with their Zeppelin super-worship. I want a little more support for them - I don't want people to write them off as the one-hit wonders to be relegated to the bargain bins, with a few minor hits here and there. I want them to change the world with their music - and, yes, I want them to listen to something other than the same worn-out copy of Physical Graffiti, but I want them to find what Greta Van Fleet actually is. I know these guys are capable of more than being the Skynet-Taco Bell-Walt Disney of classic rock revival - I want people to at least have that sentiment. I don't want the same fate that befell Silverchair to happen to them. As great of an album Diorama is, I wish people didn't reject them back in 1995 because, with our support and our embrace, they could've been even better.

And Josh, Jacob, Sam, and non-brother Daniel: yes, the world will appear like it's against you and, honestly, there's some truth to that. People often want a bit of variation to the same-old-same-old. But don't take that as people dissuading you from being your best selves, that you're nothing more than the band who wrote "Highway Song" and nothing more. I know you guys are capable of more - and I can see that based on the fact that you busted your asses, got up on stage, and managed to make that song into a sleeper hit. Remember: when something seems like it's never gonna let up, be it the hyperbolic reactions to your existence or the fact that it seems cool to rag on you (and trust me - it's easy to get swept up in the whole thing), just remember that it will get better as long as you devote yourself to getting better. If you know what you're doing and you stick to it, the darkness will let up. Take it from Daniel Johns - he's been in your shoes.