Why Midnight Oil remains one of Australia’s great natural wonders

This week our reviewers rate the latest album, Resist, from rock icons Midnight Oil, Perth-based Methyl Ethel’s Are you haunted? and Beach House’s Once twice melody.

Forty-six years young, Midnight Oil continues striving for a cohesive impact.Credit: Robert Hambling.

ROCK
Midnight Oil, RESIST (Sony), ★★★½

As an Australian rock band – the Australian rock band – Midnight Oil deserve the mythical status they accord this country’s vast natural wonder. They forged their bracing mix of punk and pub rock in 1976, and released their first (essential) greatest hits album, 20,000 Watt RSL, a mere 25 years ago. They’ve had several careers marked by iconic moments. Binary questions such as whether they’re relevant are outdated, better left for 1993 when the Earth and Sun and Moon album came out at the height of grunge.

Yet they continue to push, to strive for a cohesive impact: it’s a natural reflection of being one of the tightest live acts of all time. Their collective force is given a requiem’s strength here by 12 songs featuring the final studio contribution of bassist Bones Hillman, who died of cancer in 2020. They no longer play with full-tilt fury, but the muscular guitars that rear up in Nobody’s Child remain indomitable.

The fine line they walk is between critique and piousness. Midnight Oil have always had a prescriptive urge, but the opening exhortation of To the Ends of the Earth for the “people of the world to rise up” flirts with the generic, even if the arrangement’s uneasy tendrils undercut cliche. Power structures, social movements and history’s (t)errors are the scale they naturally work with – so sometimes the individual is shuffled aside.

Other late-era developments are more intriguing. The viscous R&B groove of At the Time of Writing plays as a document from the future, looking back with post-apocalyptic calm on the climate crisis; a reckoning from a history book yet to be written. The arrangement of We Resist shape-shifts with uneasy elegance, so that ghostly percussion and defiant squalls refuse to allow the anthemic to take hold. Guitarist Jim Moginie, the most prolific of the band’s songwriters, continues to alternate soundscapes against four-on-the-floor momentum.

Age shall not weary Midnight Oil, but it sometimes allows for wonder. “Well I lost myself when I walked through you,” Peter Garrett sings on Tarkine, a melodic paean to the tree-covered landscape as evocative as an Albert Namatjira painting. Like any canonical act they have their blind spots, but Midnight Oil can still cut through. Check Reef’s first 12 words: “We’ve got the green light, we’re gonna dynamite, a world heritage site.” How’s that for the temper of the time? CRAIG MATHIESON

ART-POP
Methyl Ethel, ARE YOU HAUNTED? (Future Classic), ★★★½

Changes are afoot in Jake Webb’s world. The Perth songwriter behind Methyl Ethel framed his first three albums as a trilogy; with his fourth record he’s shifted course. Previously the bass was the bedrock of his songs, with sparkling, shimmering, wobbly guitars providing a psych-pop backdrop for his high-pitched wail. His best-known song, 2017’s Ubu, was of a piece with MGMT or Foster the People: driving dance-pop with a refrain (“Why’d you have to go and cut your hair?“) that was difficult to dislodge. Apart from the high-strung Afro-pop guitars of Something to Worry About, the most obvious change here is that keyboards take centre stage. Opener Ghosting revolves around piano arpeggios and stringy synths, with Webb adopting a semi-operatic vocal style. Both Neon Cheap and Proof utilise undulating, twangy Indian-style instrumentation, the latter featuring fellow sandgroper Stella Donnelly in a call-and-response rumination on our post-truth world, Donnelly singing: “I’ve got numbers, clear things up for you, take a chance on proof if you want to”. Webb embraces the approach of pop-maximalists such as Passion Pit and Dirty Projectors, and if this is the start of another trilogy, who knows where he’ll end up? BARRY DIVOLA

ALTERNATIVE
Beach House, ONCE TWICE MELODY (Sub Pop), ★★★★

Beach House’s expansive eighth studio album may sound like a logical continuation of their past surreal, swirling dream pop, but this time the US duo achieves some firsts. It’s their first album without another producer and their first with a live string section. The result is Alex Scally and Victoria Legrand running free, whether they’re playing with ’60s psychedelia (Once Twice Melody), ’80s nostalgia (Superstar) or Italo disco (Runaway). While Scally arranges these glittery soundscapes, Legrand’s vocals lead the listener through this 18-track labyrinth, spanning different eras, emotions and aesthetics. Released in four chapters, the record blooms slowly. The cinematic first chapter is vast, conjuring images of driving down LA highways, punctuated by extravagance (Pink Funeral) and melancholy (Through Me). The intoxicating mix of dizzying strings and powdery wisps (as on ESP and The Bells) is reminiscent of French duo Air. Illusion of Forever details the smoke and mirrors of beauty on a lush and atmospheric melody underscored by a signature Beach House drum machine. The final chapter culminates with soaring manifestos Hurts to Love and Modern Love Stories, a triumphant end to a thrilling journey. KISH LAL

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