Midnight Oil Blazes With Lyric Message

For almost 20 years, Australia’s Midnight Oil has fused melodic, driving guitar rock with uncompromising political and environmental messages. At the quintet’s 90-minute House of Blues show on Monday, a capacity crowd demonstrated how effective that combination can be in the right hands.

Throughout a stirring rendition of “The Dead Heart,” from the 1987 album “Diesel and Dust,” the audience spontaneously and fervently harmonized with singer Peter Garrett. These Sunset Strip clubgoers seemed unlikely candidates to identify so strongly with disenfranchised aborigines, yet they sang as if they had lived every word. Rage Against the Machine should be so inspiring.

Midnight Oil’s anthems stick because the band balances instrumental power and lyrical defiance without diminishing either the music’s intensity or the songs’ impact. The presentation has drama, but it’s not melodramatic. The players stuck to their signature sound--sinewy, slightly soulful, subtly cinematic--but their command of dynamics kept the mood varied, and the music was never generic.

Sweaty and obviously enjoying themselves, the band members blazed through a well-paced set mixing old favorites and selections from their new album, “Underwater.” Bald and imposing, Garrett hurled himself around the stage, played harmonica and occasionally banged a tambourine. He leavened the sober subject matter with humorous banter, teasingly introducing the country-tinged new tune “One Too Many Times” as their “grunge folk song.” These moments proved that a rock band can be serious without being deadly.