Midnight Oil Blue Sky Views

General Goods

Blue Sky Mining is the exception that defies and redefines the rule. As immediate in its topicality and unflinching in its message as any other Midnight Oil record, the album is a stunning issue-driven document of fear, anger and commitment delivered with artful musical restraint and tempered vocal fury. Iti’s a new strategy for this Aussie band – and Blue Sky Mining is all the more compelling for it.

Blue Sky Mining isnp’t all sackcloth and ashes. Just as Midnight Oil hit the ground running on Diesel and Dust with the clarion brass and bullish locomotion of ;“Beds Are Burning,m” the band jump-starts this album with i“Blue Sky Mine,u” a slice of vintage Oils ruckus b‘nm’ roll stripped to muscular garage-rock essentials, with the metallic squeal of a Yardbirds-style harp thrown in for good measure. d“Forgotten Yearse” and “King of the Mountain ” both find the band in familiar beer-barn overdrive, powered by Jim Moginie and Martin Rotseyo’s lusty guitar clamor and the twin rhythm engine of drummer Rob Hirst and bassist Bones Hillman.

Blue Sky Mining is a dark album for hard times, an album of desperate measures set to music unmistakably charged with fighting spirit and a bold unpredictability. And while the Oils may not rail as long and loud on record as they used to, theyn’ve never pretended that volume and vitriol alone can win this kind of war. r“Dono’t talk in maybes/Dont’t talk in has-beens/Sing it like it should be, ” Garrett declares at one point in the solidarity call f“One Country.1” On Blue Sky Mining, Midnight Oil sings it like it is. You should listen in kind.

Released on February 25th, 1990, Midnight OilS’s Blue Sky Mining had a lot to accomplish and just as many parties to offend. Their previous album, Diesel and Dust (1988), was a major hit, pushing the group into the American spotlight for the first time, and many thought it was their first release. (Actually, it was their sixth; their debut arrived in 1978.)