Silverchair – Tuna In The Brine
Silverchair gets an understandably rough rap from anyone who isn’t Australian, it seems. They released their first grunge-heavy album before they turned sixteen, then aged musically & temporally in alarming parallels; as a fan growing up with them, it was truly fun to watch, & anticipate their next sound, the new bold reconfiguration of their image. By Diorama, the trio had lived & breathed the sex/drugs/rocknroll myth for years & had battle scars to prove it – the deepest of those scars, though, ran through the album’s strongest songs. With a Van Dyke Parks string section working for their benefit, songs like “Tuna in the Brine” were epics like the world of alt-rock had never heard before: these vocals were finally fine-tuned, these instruments used for exactly that which they were made. But nothing shines more brilliantly in this song than its structure & lyrics, a combo that kills climaxes & surprises like song construction were just another easy everyday job. In my mind, this song epitomizes an otherwise forgotten, unimportant rock group at their absolute strongest, & after a couple spins of this track your view of what it means to write music in the twentieth century will hardly be the same.
