Riffs for The Apocalypse

By Guy Garcia

PERFORMER: MIDNIGHT OIL

ALBUM: EARTH AND SUN AND MOON

LABEL: COLUMBIA RECORDS

THE BOTTOM LINE: An activist message grafted to a buoyant rock beat produces Mad Max music you can dance to.

In an era when anomie and rage masquerade as meaning for most rock bands, it's easy to forget that progressive politics and music once resonated to the same social vibrations. That has never been a problem for Midnight Oil, the Australian outfit with a knack for turning its ideals into pop anthems for the common man. In the group's 1988 hit, Beds Are Burning, singer Peter Garrett warned: "The time has come/ To say fair's fair/ To pay the rent/ To pay our share."

In Earth and Sun and Moon the wages of justice remain the same, but the lyrics are sharper, the music deeper. The band, which has been influenced by the Aboriginal cultures of the Australian outback, has forged a passionate yet never preachy style that expresses its activist instincts in elemental terms. Propelled by jagged guitar riffs and a buoyant rock beat, the 11 songs seethe with apocalyptic images derived from urban nightmares and primordial dreams. Dust storms, hurricanes and infernal conflagrations rake the world in a kind of New Age Armageddon. In the eyes of Midnight Oil, Mother Nature has been violated, and she's looking for revenge.

Drums of Heaven describes a terminal wasteland where the "tears of the crocodile water the sun" and "kidney bone cities are crumbling to dust." Feeding Frenzy uses sepulchral organ chords and a throbbing bass line to drive home its point that civilization has bloodied its own waters; Garrett sings, "Computers and shovels, churches and brothels/ Mannequins and skeletons, cities and dust bowls/ Here we go again/ Hear the clamor of the feeding pen." Garrett, who ran unsuccessfully for the Australian Senate in 1984, sings like a man on a mission, his voice stoked with righteous indignation as he lashes out at racial bigotry, mindless materialism and ecological irresponsibility.

Highly melodic despite all its doomsday undertones, Earth and Sun and Moon remains infectiously listenable. This is Mad Max music you can dance to. Several cuts even hold out a flicker of hope. Bushfire predicts a "new day/ It's larger than life, darker than death/ We're gonna move those mountains aside." And in Now or Never Land, Midnight Oil invites the listener to "dream a South Pacific dream of now or never land/ Suitcase full of good ! ideas/ History that's filled with tears/ Kill nostalgia, xenophobic fears/ It's now or never land." It's an urgent ultimatum from a band with a burning vision.