** Silverchair

NEON BALLROOM

(Epic)

Nobody really expects Australia's young and grungy Silverchair to forge a strong musical identity of their own at this point. After all, they are the band who got their start playing Bush to Pearl Jam's Nirvana, appropriating the brooding intensity of Ten in hits that made Stone Temple Pilots seem subtle by comparison. And they'll probably never live that down. So why bother trying? That appears to be the logic that guides singer/guitarist Daniel Johns into his Neon Ballroom, the band's third CD. The disc opens with a suitably shameless but artful cop of the melancholy alienation and foreboding orchestrations that dominated Radiohead's critically acclaimed 1997 triumph OK Computer, replete with Thom Yorke-style falsetto vocals. The tune, "Emotional Sickness," features the line "Orchestral tear cash flow," which may be nonsense but you kinda know what Johns is getting at, as well as a cameo by Australia's crazed classical pianist David Helfgott (yes, the guy from that film), which qualifies as a another kind of nonsense, though, once again, you kinda know what the child prodigies in Silverchair are getting at. Johns hasn't completely written off heavy guitar riffing yet, or his obsession with mortality. He's just learned that it pays to temper both with strings and a little sentimentality.

-- Matt Ashare