"Midnight Oil is at it's most convincing when it's pissed off"
- Rob Hirst

There's a new entry in the long-running debate on a suitable design for a new Australian flag. It's submitted by the creative team of Garrett, Hirst, Moginie, Hillman and Rotsey and it's a bloody big red kangaroo with a double-barrelled shotgun slung jauntily over it's shoulder. Actually, that's the cover to the new Midnight Oil album Redneck Wonderland, and it's a not-so-subtle acknowledgment of the cold change sweeping the country. Like grizzled warriors called out of ceremonial duty and back into the frontline, Australia's best-loved veteran rockers have rediscovered the rage that fuelled many of their greatest songs, and on their new album tackle the worst excesses of One Nation, suburban alienation and environmental apathy. In the best Oils tradition, this is a bunch of songs not afraid to ask the Big Questions.

Actually, it would be wrong to describe the new album as 'political' - it's much better than that. Unlike our leaders in Canberra, who seem content with name calling as a prelude to the inevitable horse trading, Midnight Oil are actually interested in looking at why the Bigot from Ipswich has managed to capture the imagination of so many disaffected Australians. The album ranges widely over the modern Australian landscape and it's discontents - soulless urban shopping malls, despairing rural towns and a fragmented youth culture that offers little focus for teenage angst.

The first few skittering bars of the title track may have you wondering whether the band's much-vaunted experimentation with electronica has transformed them into a Roni Size-like drum'n'bass outfit - that is, until a barrage of distorted riffing announces the return of the wondrous Oils guitar assault. Garrett rides shotgun over the songs alternately vicious/pleading arrangement, decrying a country cleared of it's natural beauty and covered over with 'brick and tile for miles'. While much of the song is accusatory in tone, Garrett's real sucker punch is a sly dissection of the mean-spirited self pity at the heart of One Nation as he almost whimpers "it is vision free, it's poor bugger me."

"Cemetery In My Mind" and "Comfortable Place On The Couch", as their titles suggest, articulate the other great theme of the album - the spiritual vacuum that haunts our suburbs. The Sabbath-like crunch of the latter songs' chorus drives home a lyric that juxtaposes a cosseted "relaxed and comfortable" life with the need for a people's politics of heart and head: "They say the truth is what you see, I know the truth is what you feel".

One of the musical gems on the album is the psychedelic epic "Safety Chain Blues". Garrett's distressed claustrophobic vocal murmurs beneath a driving collision of guitars and Jim Moginie's glacial piano melody. The song also contains one of MO's most unaffected and affecting lyrics: "I want to hold your precious head, I will not leave you or pretend".

The two songs already debuted on last years 'best of' 20,000 Watt RSL make better sense now they're in context. "White Skin, Black Heart", loaded with ringing snare drums and overdriven riffs, is a poison pen letter to Ms Hanson that gets better with each listening, while the frantic, mutated guitars of "What Goes On" transmit the urgency of that song's theme - the growing statistic of teenage suicide.

While Midnight Oil's mesh of electronic beats and heavy metal guitars doesn't always work (the musically adventurous "Blot", with it's chop and change time signatures and schizophrenic arrangement, strays perilously close to 70's prog rock) - the point is that once again the band are prepared to irritate rather than seduce. While Moginie and Hirst demonstrated a growing mastery of tight pop structures on previous albums Breathe and Earth And Sun And Moon, what the band have delivered with Redneck Wonderland is nothing less than a sprawling, untidy rock beast that speaks, as one of their better-known hits put it, with power and passion. One wonders how it will play in Ipswich.

From Addicted To Noise, by

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