As well as Sir David Sylvian the Fantastic, I've been falling back on the old favourites quite a lot since I started listening to a lot of music again post-boring uni crap, so here's someone else I listen to in insanely large doses...
Midnight Oil
The Real Thing
2000
genre: rock
1. The Real Thing - 3:32
2. Say Your Prayers - 4:27
3. Spirit Of the Age - 3:11
4. Feeding Frenzy
[live] - 6:01
5. Tell Me the Truth
[live] - 3:36
6. The Dead Heart
[live] - 6:05
7. Tin Legs and Tin Mines
[live] - 4:43
8. Short Memory
[live] - 4:52
9. In the Valley
[live/unplugged] - 3:32
10. Blue Sky Mine
[live] - 4:24
11. US Forces
[live] - 4:25
12. Warakurna
[live/unplugged] - 4:28
13. Truganini
[live/unplugged] - 4:38
14. The Last Of the Diggers - 4:19
As a few of you reading this may know already, I'm a huge Midnight Oil fan, to the extent that along with Nick Cave, the Dirty Three and Dead Can Dance, they stand as a prime example to me of how underrated Australian music seems to be by the northern hemisphere of the industry. Don't know why that is exactly. Hell, just because I can string a few sentences together and give it a name like the Doghouse v.II doesn't mean I'm right about this, but the fact that a lot of Australia's musical products are very much overshadowed by whatever's happening with those cats in the UK and US of A certainly seems to me to be the case.
Anyway, I'm rambling (and not in a semi-productive way). No matter what Peter Garrett's doing these days to make a mockery of his legacy as the Oils' lead singer, I'll still always love this band. A lot of it's got to do with the fact that they were (before their breakup in 2002) a band with a message, and not one that were good enough despite making albums that were too damn long (the Clash), not one that uses its own hype as an excuse to release sh
itty album after sh
itty album (U2), and not one that just plain annoys me (REM). A lot more of it's the fact that they have this way of really packing a punch with their songs in a weird, subtle (well, as subtle as environmentalism gets anyway
) way. I can never quite put my finger on why that is. Could be that in Rob Hirst and Bones Hillman they have one hell of a rhythm section to make the whole unit work, or the fact that Garrett's one of most charismatic frontmen in rock music that I can think of, that their resident multi-tasker Jim Moginie has quite a good voice himself on top of being a great musician...as I say, I dunno.
For at least the last three or four months, I've been thinking about a way I can just tell you guys to give them a try, but...
a) I can't be bothered to start a discography thread
b) I always get bored if those after tackling the first couple of albums
c) I'm an EP short of the full discography anyway
So instead of all that nonsense that'd, y'know, actually require some sort of effort, I'm just gonna recommend you get hold of this instead. Despite basically being the definitive album you'd knock out to eat up more of the clauses on your contract (ie a three-quarters live album with a few new studio recordings, including a cover), it's actually not half bad. Fairly good even. There are four studio recordings to be found (the title track here being a revision of
this golden oldie), the best of which is probably the powerful, menacing figure of
Say Your Prayers (written and recorded for the charity album Viva East Timor). That said, all of the studio recordings here aren't really among what I'd call the Oils' best. The four of them do all fall short of their finest, as the live versions of the said finest are right here to be found as well. Mostly culled from a show in October '94 at the Metro Theatre in Sydney and otherwise from a 1993 episode of MTV Unplugged, here's where curious folk such as your good selves can hear just how good the Oils were live. There really are some fantastic performances on this album,
the Dead Heart,
Tin Legs and Tin Mines, a B-E-A-utiful version of
In the Valley and
Warakurna being my personal picks of the bunch. Believe me though, they're all immense.
As a starting point, or even as an 'I've got one or two albums and wanna hear more just so I can be as cool as that stallion of a member who calls himself Bulldog' point, trust me - this album's a necessity. As I said before, the studio recordings here aren't among the Oils' best though. Much as I hate to be a bore, I'm gonna dish out another one of these ratings;
And before I forget...
David Sylvian & Holger Czukay - The Spiralling Of Winter Ghosts
A little something for the David Sylvian Month portion. I won't go on too long.
Anyway, in the last two posts you've already seen a couple of works that Sylvian's name is, in however subtle a way, attached to. There is, as the more in-tune of us may already know, a totally different side to Sylvian's discography. This not only covers the moajority of his collaborations down the years, but also his experiments with ambient music, with a dash or two of musique conrete thrown in occasionally.
What you'll hear resonating from the above video is basically an ambient piece that, as with any of them, will either bore you to tears or really cut the mustard with you. It's both a case of being in the mood for it and simply having the stomach for it. The above extract though (the full-length track is around 10 minutes longer), put together with the help of Can's Holger Czukay, basically sums up the more experimental half of Sylvian's discography. Go on, have a listen!