Midnight Oil — Diesel and Dust
album review

ALBUM REVIEW

Midnight Oil's sixth album, Diesel and Dust, was something of a breakout for them—it finally took the Oils' music to a global audience. The international success came partly on the strength of a couple of hit songs—"The Dead Heart" and "Beds Are Burning"—but also on the strength of generally good songwriting and great studio production values. For instance, the song "Beds Are Burning" featured a warm, plodding bass line and an instantly memorably three-note guitar/trumpet hook juxtaposed with equally memorable lyrical hooks like: "The time has come to say 'fair's fair'; the time has come to pay our share." The song is about the rights of aboriginal peoples, usurpation of land, and freedom—themes that come up a number of times in Diesel and Dust. Political lyrics were nothing new for Midnight Oil at the time they wrote this album, and they're a centerpiece here, too. Other topics include weapons of mass destruction and the ruination of natural landscapes for the sake of resource extraction. But don't think you're just in for a dry lecture with Diesel and Dust—the boys in the band spent a lot of time working on the music and catchy lyrical phrasings that go with the messages, so it's easy to enjoy the songs without getting worn out by preaching. Overall, the songwriting here shows Midnight Oil reaching maturity, with the Oils adding some nifty musical spices to many of the songs, including the sweeping trumpets in "Beds Are Burning," the spacey synths in "Put Down That Weapon," the semi-mellotron passages in "Arctic World," the plucky guitar riffs in "Dreamworld," and the occasion "do-do-do" or "na-na-na" lyrical passages that look silly in print but can really help put the icing on a song and make it more accessible. All of this serves to elevate Diesel and Dust above Midnight Oil's earlier efforts, which tended to be a little more raw, and makes the album one of the must-have Midnight Oil CDs.