Silverchair: Neon Ballroom

If Collective Soul can cast off the shackles of warmed-over grunge and make a decent record (this year's Dosage), why not the Australian teen sensation Silverchair Listening to the opening moments of the group's third album Neon Ballroom—the follow-up to 1997's dreadful Nirvana rip-off Freak Show—it sure seems to be trying. Awash in strings, and arriving complete with a frantic piano solo by Shine inspiration David Helfgott, the six-minute "Emotion Sickness" also marks one of the first occasions in which Silverchair frontboy Daniel Johns sings rather than falling back on the alt-rock vocal template of slurred, easily parodied moaning. Ambitious and epic, if not particularly memorable, "Emotion Sickness" is at least promising. Then, as if to make up for lost time, Silverchair plunges headlong downhill, wheezing, posing, and sloganeering its way through the unbearable "Anthem For The Year 2000." The rest of Neon Ballroom falls somewhere between the two extremes, with well-intentioned, bleary, we're-mature-now ballads—most notably the catchy, mid-tempo "Ana's Song (Open Fire)" and the album-closing "Steam Will Rise"—sprinkled amid a mostly sorry soup of bile-spitting wank sessions ("Spawn Again") and overwrought Nirvana impersonations ("Dearest Helpless"). Ultimately, aside from a few especially low points, Neon Ballroom is a collective step forward, but Silverchair has a long, long way to go from here.