rhinosplode

Midnight Oil Blue Sky Mining
by J. Wasserman

Midnight Oil are a decidedly unhip band. Best known in the U.S. for being the band that gave us "Beds Are Burning" and in their native Australia as a band for middle-aged environmentalists, their recorded output just barely hints at the sheer power that the band transmits in concert. The two times I caught their live show were revelatory and more than a bit nerve-wracking: at New York's Irving Plaza, I thought for sure that their Lugosiesque singer, Peter Garrett, was going to crack his head open on the venue's low-hanging front-of-house PA speakers.

Years before I saw the band live, though, I heard this album at my friend Bryan's house. I was sleeping over, if I remember correctly, and we were hanging out the way middle-school boys do--playing video games, looking at comics, complaining about assorted things, &c. At that stage in my development, Bryan was (and still is, come to think of it) my conduit for musical awesomeness. His older sisters were in high school and college and listened to great stuff like U2, INXS, R.E.M., and Midnight Oil. I think the tape of Blue Sky Mining came from one of them.

I bought my own copy of the tape (along with U2's The Joshua Tree) a few weeks later before going off to summer camp and haven't looked back since. The original tape lost a fight with my '85 Volvo's stereo, so I replaced it with a CD. It doesn't really matter what the format is, though, because there isn't a single song I skip, even when I go on a binge and listen to the CD four or five times in a row. It's just that good.

Midnight Oil, when they existed, were a political band that didn't try to scream their way into our consciousness--they preferred to rock (hard) catchy songs that everyone could sing along to, even American kids who didn't know Canberra from Warrakurna, Truganini from Ned Kelly. The tunes, even the polished songs on Blue Sky Mining, are simple and direct, betraying the Oils' pop-punk roots. Their non-abrasive approach to rock music made, I bet, far more people pay attention to their lyrics than did bands like Minor Threat. Peter Garrett might be the Australian Chuck D, but his bandmates were no Bomb Squad.

There's something distinctly Australian about them, too, beyond Garrett's parched croak of a voice. The songs, especially on this album, are open and spacious, like I imagine the Outback to be. The chiming guitars on "Mountains of Burma" and "Forgotten Years" live in the farthest reaches of your speakers, while the middle is home to propulsive drums and bass, and Garrett's insistent clarion calls of environmental responsibility, justice for indigenous peoples, and world peace. "One Country," with its slow martial buildup behind crystaline acoustic guitar, could be Australia's answer to "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall", while "King of the Mountain" is pure bar-band rock-and/or-roll.

In these days when even Rage Against the Machine has become a bunch of lovesong crooners, Midnight Oil probably strikes most people as old-fashioned. They experimented with techno (the ill-advised Redneck Wonderland album), but for the most part, their albums have been full of straight-ahead populist rock. Garrett's lyrics favor simplicity and directness over convoluted metaphor ("The river runs red / A black rain falls / Dust in my hand"), a rare thing in this day of post-Pavement mumblery.

I guess Midnight Oil's legacy will be that of an inspiration to a generation of activist rockers, whether those bands know (or acknowledge) it or not. You can hear strains of the Oils in the music of Billy Bragg, Ani DiFranco, Rage Against the Machine, Rancid, and countless others, not to mention direct descendents like the Aboriginal agit-dance band Yothu Yindi. Now that Peter Garrett's broken up the band so he can pursue his career in the Australian Parliament, we'll have to turn to still-current acts to address issues like the coming wars on assorted members of the "Axis of Evil". We're definitely missing out by not having Midnight Oil around to write an album about it.