Capricornia

“Golden Age,” the leadoff track on Midnight Oil’s 2002 album Capricornia, is the kind of song that R.E.M. fans wish that band had been making late in its career. Sharp and jangly, the song echoes the Oils’ heyday without imitating it. It’s a surprisingly lean track for a band that had reached its third decade of operation. Yet, for the majority of Capricornia, Midnight Oil sounds younger than ever. It’s not that the band is incorporating new trends into its music (though some unusual textures find their way into “Capricornia” and “Under the Overpass”)—but simply that the songs have a focus and momentum usually reserved for groups at the start of their careers. Crisp and glowing, “Too Much Sunshine,” “Luritja Way," and “World That I See” have the immediacy and swelling passion of the Oils’ earlier work, but they're delivered with a new clarity of sound. The steady-marching “Tone Poem” functions as an echo of the band’s biggest hit, 1987’s “Beds Are Burning,” as Peter Garrett finds himself rephrasing the same question, as pertinent as it had been 15 years earlier: “Where will you live when the fields are falling? Where will you live when the feedlot's calling?”