*** SILVERCHAIR, “Freak Show,” Epic

It was so easy to scoff. When this picture-perfect surfer-teen trio’s debut album, “Frogstomp,” hit America, the then 15-year-old singer Daniel Johns looked eerily like Kurt Cobain and sang like Eddie Vedder, and each riff (especially the hit song “Tomorrow”) felt like something that Pearl Jam’s Mike McCready and Stone Gossard concocted five years ago.

So when it became a huge hit, Silverchair was widely scolded for being young, grunge-derivative and from Australia--a vast body of water removed from the Seattle sound’s birthplace.

Holing up to make album two in Sydney with PiL and Gang of Four producer Nick Launay, the band was apparently fired up by the criticism and grounded by its remarkable success. “Freak Show” is a powerful and gloriously imperfect work of sludgy, scrappy garage metal. Punkish, thrash-heavy, packed with unabashed testosterone and loaded with self-flagellating angst, it moves nimbly from the caustic basement-rock of “Pop Song for Us” to the venom-as-therapy anthem “Learn to Hate,” with its echoes of PiL.

While Bush pushes grunge as mainstream pop music, Silverchair has happily burrowed down into more deviant influences such as the Velvet Underground and Helmet. In the process, it has found something of its own. Coolness factor notwithstanding, “Freak Show” suggests that these hard-rocking adolescents will indeed grow up.

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Albums are rated on a scale of one star (poor) to four (excellent).