POP MUSIC REVIEW : Midnight Oil Gets to Cookin’ Just as the Moon Rises

Heaven itself smiled on Midnight Oil on Saturday night, which just goes to show that heaven has great taste in rock ‘n’ roll.

As the Australian band played “Outbreak of Love,” a lustrous, mystically brooding song from its astrally named current album, “Earth and Sun and Moon,” the moon rose above the high-vaulting stage canopy at Irvine Meadows, providing a light show of the best sort.

With its lush arrangement and stately gait, “Outbreak” is a departure for Midnight Oil, a band known foremost for its charging, politicized anthems.

In a further digression from type, Midnight Oil followed it at mid-set with an inventive, episodic reworking of the Grateful Dead’s folk-based “Wharf Rat” that built to a wild, “Revolver”-like psychedelic swirl courtesy of guitarist Jim Moginie.

Still, it was those blast-force, storm-the-battlements anthems that carried the show, and as Midnight Oil charged ahead with a drive and clarity unsurpassed in contemporary rock, one supposed that if all the heavenly bodies and signs of the Zodiac were aligned against the band, they could hardly have disrupted its mission. The Oils, who always sing on the side of the underdog, would probably take extra glee in bucking the astrological odds.

The guest appearance by a nearly full moon was welcome, lending an impressive prop above a bare stage set that dispensed with the desolate Australian Outback-settlement scenario the band had used in the past, complete with scrap metal debris, stuffed kangaroo and scaled-down water tower.

Midnight Oil doesn’t need scenery. In singer Peter Garrett, it has one of rock’s sights to behold. He is a towering figure, well over six feet tall, who glares out from under a brow line as craggy and severe as Ayers Rock.

Garrett would be fascinating if he just stood still, but he spent most of the show careening about the stage in robotic, herky-jerk motion, stepping high and swinging his arms frantically, like some scary wind-up toy. The result is a central figure both eminently watchable and uncommonly funny.

The visual humor helps (watching a roadie set up Garrett’s microphone, then walk under it, provided a pretty good laugh before the show had even started), because Midnight Oil does some serious business. Its songs take swipes at corporate greed, environmental degradation and the usurpation of indigenous peoples, with the culture of Australian Aborigines providing the specific imagery for many songs.

Between numbers, Garrett was a first-class agitator, sardonic, dismissive and brashly confrontational but also capable of making his points pithily and getting on with the next song.

Music that offers only caustic politicking can quickly wear out its welcome. But Midnight Oil communicated far more love for the ideals it defends than contempt for the opponents it attacks. The music was yearning, uplifting and beautifully executed.

From Bones Hillman’s opening bass rumble it was evident that the band was primed and alive, and it delivered with a brand of rock both muscular and calibrated. Garrett’s chesty but piercing voice is in the Joe Strummer school, but carries much greater clarity and range. The Oils cushioned it beautifully with two ace harmony singers in Hillman and drummer Rob Hirst.

The show hit a peak with a rousing “Beds Are Burning,” the 1988 breakthrough hit that stands as the equal of any ‘80s rock anthem, the Springsteen and U2 songbooks included.

Garrett introduced it by mocking the notion of commercial success as a measure of musical worth: “Here’s a song that we hope means just a little more than that.” Hillman helped it along with deliciously gritty chug-a-chug bass lines that would have sounded at home on “The Who Live at Leeds.”

Another highlight was “Best of Both Worlds,” the show’s brawniest number (and, dating from 1983, the oldest), which proved that a sufficiently accomplished rock band can be almost infernally aggressive and heavy without taking the easy path of grunging up the sound with a lot of thickening distortion.

As a finale, Midnight Oil, joined by members of second-billed Hothouse Flowers, played the unreleased “Land,” a protest song bewailing the clear-cut chopping of old-growth forests. It oscillated between rueful folk and slashing hard rock.

The only problem was that, at 16 songs and 95 minutes, this show was far too short--especially when you consider that three of the best and most lyrical tracks from the strong “Earth and Sun and Moon” album went unplayed (those being the title song, “Now or Never Land” and “In the Valley”).

And when a band can afford to leave a sure-to-rouse anthem like “Sometimes” off its set list, you know it is developing quite a deep catalogue. Two hours would have been better, but Midnight Oil delivered enough to make Garrett’s first declaration of the night more than an idle boast:

“Friends! Friends! Friends! Welcome to the moment that matters more than any other.”

By the time the final note had sounded, Midnight Oil had indeed mustered a show that mattered, the sort of concert that invigorates and charges up the spirit the way the best rock can, and leaves you thinking that maybe life holds greater possibilities than you had believed on the way in.

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The Dublin band Hothouse Flowers also relies on fervor, although its slant is spiritual rather than political.

In Liam O’Maonlai, the Flowers have a striking if somewhat Bono-esque singer who also provided piano that rolled, jangled and glistened. However, guitarist Fiachna O’Braonain was virtually missing in action until the final song of the 40-minute set, leaving the field to Leo Barnes, a severely limited saxophonist who tried to make up

in flash and noisy whinnying what he lacked in solid chops.

While the Flowers’ gospel-style harmonies were strong and full (suspiciously so, making one wonder whether electronic enhancement was being used to get that rich, choir-like sound), the set, which ignored the band’s first and best album, didn’t muster enough of the required tent-revival spirit to transcend such strident and didactic lyrics as “I believe in things of beauty--do you?”