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Breathe |
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Breathe
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Breathe |
It isn't easy being green, especially in a world increasingly cemented, as the Australian group Midnight Oil remind us once again on their new Breathe (Work/Sony, in stores October 15). The best one can do is keep the faith, hope for a revolution in world consciousness, and write groovy songs about it. Which is the Oils' most redeeming quality -- the way they offer pleasure just as readily as pamphleteering philosophy. In the Preston Sturges film Sullivan's Travels, a socially conscious movie director was torn between his desire to make a statement opus called Brother Where Art Thou? and the public's demand for more pleasing fare like Hey, Hey in the Hayloft (this was 1941). The Oils have resolved this not uncommon dilemma - Breathe is fairly steeped in eco message and mysticism but never at the expense of the agreeable combinations that can be wrung from the basic line-up of two guitars, bass, drums, and occasional keyboard.
Although popular since the early '80s in their native country, the band are seen as something of a flash in the pan stateside - as soon as '80s nostalgia kicks in for real, they're bound to be a hot item on several compilations. In fact, the Oils' moment of maximum impact on the American psyche was occasioned by their video for "Beds Are Burning" (from '87's Diesel and Dust) - the piledriver beat and terse hook helped, as did the sight of lead singer Peter Garrett, six-foot-plus and biscuit bald, galumphing like a galvanized golem. It wasn't some newly born American concern for the plight of Australian aborigines and the despoiling of the continent's natural wonders - for the band both theme and subtext - that pushed the album to #17, it was the combination of basic rock and compelling visuals.
It served them well for about one more album, then they began to fall off the map. In '92 they released Scream in Blue, a blistering set of live performances ranging from '82 to '90, the kind of overheated guitar orgy that makes vocals - if not songs - superfluous. In '93 came the studio set Earth and Sun and Moon, uneven and overproduced by half, as though intricate arrangements and background vocals could disguise the way their old intensity had not so much matured as abandoned them.
Breathe, then, is an improvement. Stripped to basics, it offers the cleverly crafted guitar interplay of Jim Moginie and Martin Rotsey, Moginie's amusingly tacky organ playing on "Underwater" (the first single, and rightly so), and Rob Hirst's calculatedly "sloppy" drum playing ("Ringo-like," the promo sheet says) on some cuts, so preferable in its hedonistic, psychedelic beingness to the old '80s tight-ass slamming style. All these little delights plus Garrett's ever-expanding vocal range. Where he once sounded like the voice of doom on cocaine, he now lightens up more frequently, even doing a duet with Emmylou Harris ("Home") and holding his own in the sensitivity department.
Then there are the lyrics, generally more opaque than in the past, which is good. Not that you have to be some kind of nutter to buy into their basic theme - who doesn't prefer the comforting meadow to the merciless curbstones, in theory anyway? It's the cumulatively post-Apocalyptic mise-en-scène of the songs that seem a bit much. Even an ostensibly good-time number like "Surf's Up Tonight" can't refrain from hinting at a blighted world: "Now I was lonely, you were too/I met you down at the waterline/Now there's something we can do/Now there's something left to do." Throughout we get stuff like "Pummeled fields, beaten plains" ("Sins of Omission"), "Hope you've a god/It's time to pray" ("Star of Hope"), "We've got to prick that bubble in the shopping arcade" ("E-Beat"), and "Lift up your eyes, look to heaven/Could be a sign or a 7-Eleven" ("Bring On the Change"). The ugly structures of commerce are blocking the cosmic view. Well, maybe.
These are lyrics for the alienated elite, those who read the nuances of their ontological discomfort like tea leaves and know that there's a message in every twinge of uneasiness, that that swooning sense of Otherness is an omen. They get intimations of significance while the rest of us poor slobs just feel crappy. But you know what? I don't care. As long as the music pleases, I just don't care.
Reviewer: Richard C. Walls