tdh Opinions Reviews Breathe

Breathe

Between the Rock and the Black Stump, here lies Midnight Oil. While that may be a glib way of assessing the band's ongoing relevance, the problem Midnight Oil has faced in the 1990s is that, in an era where popular culture is ruled by its own cannibalistic sense of irony, the world is not such a black and white place as they may once have had us believe.

U2 confronted the same problem at the beginning of the decade and conquered it with the showbiz exaggerations of Achtung Baby and Zoo TV. Midnight Oil have remained the rearguard modernists, and their stocks have fallen accordingly. So once again the band have reinvented themselves, as they have done successfully before on their two greatest works, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 (1982) and Diesel and Dust (1987).

The change is one of spirit and feeling rather than the complete sonic reconstructions of those albums, however. While Breathe's loose, garagey rawness echoes the band's previous album Earth and Sun and Moon, the album is mostly gentle and low-key, the band trading off excitement and relying instead upon quiet, pulse-like insistency for impact.

This works beautifully on the loving and gracefully melodic "Surf's Up Tonight", where Midnight Oil's commitment and sheer humanity continues to inspire. Consensus and even forgiveness are the dominant themes: "Common Ground", "Time to Heal" and the campfire strum of "One Too Many Times" all mark Breathe as an album about reconciliation; not just racial, but personal and spiritual. There is no irony to be found here, only heart.

Ultimately, though, Breathe is unlikely to be greeted with outstretched palms in the venues that Midnight Oil blew apart in earlier years, and it's too self-consciously modest to win over flippant new fans. So where does that leave them?

Reviewer: Andrew Stafford