Oils Gig Reviews
Chicago Metro - Oct 96
With their anvil-like guitars, anthemic songs and mountainous front man, Midnight Oil is a band built for stadiums. All the more reason to cherish the Australian quintet's concert Thursday at a sold-out Metro, where they brought the spastic passion face to face with 1,100 followers.
For 90 minutes, shaven-headed, 6-foot-5-inch singer Peter Garret stalked the stage like a gangly marionette: arms chopping, legs lurching, hips twitching. He sings about environmental pollution, racist public policy, military overkill and the joy of surfing the ocean on a moonlit night.
Not much for love songs, this band. They aren't particularly sensual or sexy, and they could use a sense of humor. But those are the standards for bands bred on MTV. The Oils have always had a different agenda, since rising 20 years ago from the bare-knuckled environs of the Australian pub circuit. They still play as though spoiling for a fight, as though the next song really could make a difference in someone's life.
The band honored its brawling roots with spastic, stop-start punk assaults, but also explored a leaner, more groove-based sound on more recent songs such as "Underwater" and "Surf's UP Tonight" frm its upcoming album "Breathe". These emphasize the thick bass lines of Bones Hillman and the spare, danceable beats of drummer Rob Hirst, and favored a spaciousness missing in the earlier, busier arrangements. It was the new approach that carried over into an atmospheric, trip-hop-style remake of the 1986 anthem "The Dead Heart", in which the tension was strung out rather than exploded.
There was also an acoustic interlude, in which suchs songs as "One Too Many Times" presented the Oils at their most unassuming, a welcome relaxation of what was once a perpetually double-fisted attack. But it was the Oils at full burn that the audience came to see, and the band did not disappoint. Although the Australians pointedly did not perform their biggest Nort American hit, "Beds are Burning", by spurning a prolonged ovation for a third encore, they delivered edge-of-the-world anthems such as "Progress", "Forgotten years", "Read About It", and "Dreamworld" with undiminished potency.
Guitarists Jim Moginie and Martin Rotsey alternated tense riffs with more refined, textured effects and had little use for solos. All energies were poured into the craftsmanlike songs, which occasionally sound stiff on record, but live became fuel for a raging bonfire.
Greg Kot - Chicago Tribune