Upon the January release of song Aerial Love, Daniel Johns’s first new music in eight years, I read the reviews and couldn’t quite believe them.
“It’s a soft and slow, soulful ballad,” wrote Guardian Australia’s Monica Tan, “that sees Johns alternate between a sultry croon and a nicely controlled falsetto over a throbbing drum beat.” Here and elsewhere the man – who at the age of 15 had his first major hit with 90s grunge chart stalwarts Silverchair and was once cruelly dubbed “Nirvana in pyjamas” – was now being compared to the smoky R&B chug of Melbourne’s Chet Faker. Like I said, I didn’t quite believe it.
Johns’s ill-advised cover of Smells Like Teen Spirit with piano and harp a few months back didn’t auger well. It split the commentators and fans down the middle – many weighing in on it quite harshly, though perhaps none as meanly as myself. “From Cobain wannabe to [Chris] Martin wannabe in under two decades … it’s been a long bumpy journey of downs and downers and downs for Silverchair,” I spat at my computer keyboard, thinking that his career as a creative force was long spent.
I was wrong. Respect to Johns for making me eat my words. Aerial Love really is that soulful.
The gentle throbbing bass, the sticky falsetto, the beautifully restrained electronica produced and honed past perfection by New Zealand producer Joel Little of Lorde and Broods fame ... these components recall prime American R&B practitioners, both old (Marvin Gaye) and new (Frank Ocean). There is a deftness of touch that is a delight to hear. The music feels right.
This change of musical direction does seem confusing, though – as many fans have made clear. “This is a classic case of an artist who has forgotten what made him amazing in the first place and shows a complete and utter contempt for his fans,” writes one. This slinky, sensuous, sneakily carnal music is so far removed from the sight and sound of three boys thrashing around in grungy surrounds, as seen in the video to Tomorrow (1994). If they looked like small boys messing around in big brother’s clothes, that’s because they were.
Even when Silverchair returned from the singer’s well-documented troubles with anorexia nervosa (1999 single Ana’s Song addresses the condition) and thoughts of suicide, with 2007’s portentous, award-winning Young Modern, there was no hint of the future path Johns would be taking. Instead, it felt like the band were following a timeworn path, getting all serious and doom-laden with the passage of time – the newly-shorn and tattooed Johns recalling no one quite so much as Dave Gahan of former teen idols Depeche Mode.
In 2004, there had been a momentary blip on the rock radar: an album from the Dissociatives, Johns’s collaborative project with dance producer DJ Paul Mac. The vibe was playful and, with the cartoony videos, reminiscent of both Paul McCartney’s post-Beatles 1970s output and Damon Albarn’s Gorillaz. It was palatable enough, a pleasing diversion but not groundbreaking.
The initial EP (released in 2000) was called I Can’t Believe It’s Not Rock. It was all very tongue-in-cheek. It felt like a side-project. This is not the case with Aerial Love.
Something else that is particularly stunning about this new four-track EP is that Aerial Love might not even be its finest moment.
The first song Preach – produced by underground electronic duo Damn Moroda – is too overblown. Johns sounds a little too shrill as he reaches for those highest of high notes, as he sings about loneliness and walking down high streets over a fade out of gospel-esque voices. I don’t go much for public confessionals, however sumptuously framed.
Surrender, however, is wonderful with its Eastern leanings, and gently infectious synthetic beats, and Johns’s restrained, soulful vocal. Produced in conjunction with Styalz Fuego, it recalls the elegiac and mutable beauty of underrated R&B singer Dawn Richard’s recent album Blackheart. And the second Little collaboration, the near-weightless comedown of Late Night Drive, is almost as intoxicating with its wash of synths.
“Change my old ways / Take a piece of the future,” Johns sings on Aerial Love. Rare among rock singers, he is practising what he preaches.
• Aerial Love is out now on Universal Music
