There was no "Tomorrow." On Monday night, at New York's Bowery Ballroom, the Australian trio Silverchair did not perform the first and biggest single of their career. In fact, singer-guitarist Daniel Johns, bassist Chris Joannou and drummer Ben Gillies played absolutely nothing from Frogstomp, their 1995 double-platinum debut album -- which was too bad. Early choice 'Chair like "Pure Massacre" and "Israel's Son" -- written and cut between homework and pub gigs, when Silverchair were a bonafide boy band (as in "boys who actually play in a band") -- are still headbanging dynamite, harder and heavier than the current cut-rate-Pearl-Jam of Creed and Nickelback, with a lot more melody too.

But it was an older, bolder Silverchair -- with a changed and challenged Johns -- that turned up at the Bowery. And Johns nearly didn't make it at all. Last year, during mixing sessions for the group's fourth album, Diorama, Johns was diagnosed with reactive arthritis, a rare and crippling illness which caused his body to seize up when exposed to infection. Touring was out of the question; major U.S. showcase dates to promote Diorama were cancelled. He walked with a cane and underwent extensive medical treatment and physical therapy. And while Diorama -- a high-minded collection of progressive-pop songwriting wrapped in earthquake rock and extravagant orchestrations, including three arrangements by Van Dyke Parks -- became Silverchair's crowning triumph in Australia (best-ever sales, four trophies at the Aussie version of the Grammys), the album stiffed in America.

Johns, 23, looking like a cross between a riverboat dandy and a frontier missionary in a dusty-brown three-piece suit and cravat, with a ring of dark beard offsetting his blond hair, did not act like a wronged or ravaged man at the Bowery. He played a guitar solo Hendrix-style, with his teeth, in "The Door." At one point in "Emotion Sickness," the Queen-via-Tool minisuite at the front of the 1999 album Neon Ballroom, Johns let out a big, four-bars-long howl that would have left the entire Fred Durst school of rap-metal barkers gasping for breath. And although the twin keyboards recreating the strings and things on "Across the Night" and "Luv Your Life" from Diorama sometimes pressed Johns' voice to the back of the sound mix, the band's emphasis on recent material and the sturdy supportive muscle of Gillies and Joannou made a strong case for the evolving quality and ambition in Johns' songwriting.

Johns' great modern-rock-radio sin is that he crams multiple hooks, key modulations, rhythm shifts into a single number -- there are two or three possible songs in the changes of "Emotion Sickness" alone. That's way too much action for easy drive-time digestion. But he has a good instinct for infectious, mounting contrast: the droning guitar lick that breaks into the bright heaving chorus of Neon Ballroom's "Ana's Song (Open Fire)"; the metallic surge and philharmonic luster of Diorama's "The Greatest View." And you could hear the same kind of eager cramming of riffs and bridges -- more Soundgarden than Nirvana -- in Silverchair's end run through late-Nineties history: "The Door," "Freak" and "Anthem for the Year 2000."

That was as far back as Silverchair cared to go, but no one on the floor went away unhappy. "We're getting better audiences now than we were when we were popular," Johns cracked, without irony, backstage after the show. For Silverchair, today is a lot more interesting than "Tomorrow."

DAVID FRICKE
(May 20, 2003)