Silverchair Shows Talent On New Album

At the end of 1995, as part of its typically maddening wrap-up of the year’s recordings, Rolling Stone gave passing mention to Silverchair, Australia’s fire-hot trio of alterna-teens that had just taken Down Under, and to a slightly lesser extent, America, by storm.

The magazine, like many others, criticized the band’s debut, “Frogstomp,” as imitative and immature, but it also half-jokingly noted, “When these guys turn 18, they’ll really be dangerous.”

Well, guess who just blew out the candles?

If you thought Silverchair and its catchy now-we’re-Pearl-Jam-now-we’re-Nirvana sound was just a one-note one-hit wonder, think again. In stores since Tuesday is “Freak Show,” and while it isn’t exactly a groundbreaker like “Nevermind,” it does prove that Silverchair can rock hard (and with variation) in its own right.

Besides, says lead singer Daniel Johns, who wants to remake “Nevermind,” anyway?

“We realize how much we exposed our influences on the first album,” Johns said by telephone from his home in the industrial waterfront town of Newcastle, Australia. “We really wanted to get away from that this time, try out new ideas. And because of that, this one is not nearly as accessible.

“But I don’t care. I don’t think that the new album will sell as many copies as ‘Frogstomp,’ and I don’t care about that either. All we want to do with this album is establish who we are, what Silverchair sounds like. You can always hear a band’s influences on the first album. It’s that way with everyone. We’re over it. Now we want to do something that in 10 years, we could listen to again and say, ‘Yeah, that’s our sound.”’

To a large degree, Johns, just turned 18, and his mates - bassist Chris Joannou and drummer Ben Gillies, both on the verge of 18 - have done just that. True, theirs is a noise still likely to get lost in the unwieldy alternative radio mix, but unlike, say, Bush, Silverchair is at least experimenting with its beginnings. Shades of Indian instrumentation turn up on “Petrol & Chlorine”; acoustic guitar has become more prominent, particularly on surprisingly wistful songs such as “Pop Songs for Us Rejects”; and the melodies are deeper, sharper and obviously born from a coming of age done under the hardest pressures “overnight” success can bring.

More importantly, that success has brought a unified theme to Johns’ lyrics, albeit an oft-heard one: the trappings of popularity.

“There’s a load of songs that were all written around the same time, stuff like ‘Slave’ and ‘Freak’ and (the new single) ‘Abuse Me.’ And yeah, a lot of that came from what I’d experienced and felt on the road. But it’s not like we’re totally complaining about success, either. We’re not one of those bands that gets success and then turns around and complains about how terrible it is. It’s just that the negative stuff that I see is what I like. It’s what’s important to me.

“Part of it, too, is just the privacy you lose when you’re a hit,” he added. “People chasing you down, people turning up at your house, sitting out on the lawn waiting to take photographs. That’s not easy for anyone to deal with.”

Nevertheless, Johns may have to do more of it in the coming months. “Freak Show’s” planned singles, the album’s overriding notion of alienation, and Johns’ age are likely to add up to another media-generated “spokesman of his generation” tag. Johns knows it and is wary of it.

“I really hate that,” he said softly. “People have said that in Australia, too, and it annoys me, just as it annoys anyone who doesn’t particularly like our music. I don’t think any one person can be a spokesperson for a generation. It’s too much weight to carry around when all you want to do is play music. I just throw out my ideas, that’s all.”

No problem. Except that when you write lyrics such as “Take the time to learn to hate” and others that suggest violence may be the only way to get an addict off drugs, you’re asking for trouble.

Couple that potentially controversial approach with Johns’ well-publicized arrest after he was found driving a Jeep on a Santa Monica beach without a license - and you’ve got rock’s next bad boy in the making.

Fortunately - or unfortunately, depending on your point of view - Johns will have none of it.

“I’m not concerned with what people want to make out of us,” he said earnestly.

“People are bound to misinterpret things. All lyrics are misinterpreted at some stage. But I don’t think people will act upon what we say. They’ll take it seriously, but people aren’t that gullible.

“And the arrest was no big deal, really. It was funny.”

(Johns, by the way, was released immediately after his manager produced his license. He has not been charged.)

“It’s not like we were killing people or anything,” he continued. “I could hardly stop myself from laughing through it, actually, because Dave (Navarro, guitarist for Red Hot Chili Peppers, who was with Johns at the time) kept cracking jokes every time the policeman turned away.”

For Johns, such notoriety is not what being in a rock band is about. Oh, sure, he can’t wait until the coming two tours - one of America, one of everywhere else - are over so the band can travel without parental guidance. “That’ll be rad,” he said with typical surfer flair.

But, then, Johns’ style isn’t particularly cramped at the moment. He can’t wait to finish school (one year left), he doesn’t mind not having time for girls (“Chris has a girlfriend of two years, Ben has many girlfriends, and I have a dog”), and he’s surrounded by supportive parents who love what he and his friends do for a living (“our dads especially, ‘cause they’re animals just like us”).

In the end, it could turn out that Silverchair will go down in history as alternative rock’s one true anomaly: a happy bunch of Gen-Xers.

“We don’t care about the sorts of things that bother other people, really,” Johns said.

“We just want to do things that in 30 years’ time, we can look back on with pride.”