Blue Sky Mining

Description

Blue Sky Mining is an album by the Australian alternative pop/rock band Midnight Oil, released on CBS/Columbia in February 1990. The album was recorded in 1989 at Rhinoceros Studios in Sydney, Australia; with Warne Livesey and the band producing.

After ’88’s amazingly successful call for Australian aboriginal land rights turned into a Top 40 hit in «Beds Are Burning» and a multi-platinum selling ‘Diesel and Dust’, Midnight Oil is back at it again. This raw, indignant, Aussie six-piece band continue to lock into the world’s apocalyptic future, and cry out, as did the prophets of the Old Testament, that our current ways of living are making ecological/political destruction inevitable. “Bills fall due for the industrial revolution,” sings Pete Garrett, “Scorch the earth till the earth surrenders,” in «Mountains of Burma». It’s been the ends justify the means in our business-as-usual world, “We feed an economy/ It’s got blood on its hands.” Here, human stewardship of the creation, and our faithfulness to God’s interests are brought into tension with the basic capitalist assumptions, and we are reminded what non-renewable resources really means. Most of the songs on ‘Blue Sky Mining’ refer to a coming, cleansing, judging rain, which makes Garrett and the Oils a post-Nuclear Noah, forwarning the coming annihilating floods.

In the title track, the dilemma is expressed in its fullest implications, as a blue collar worker is forced to overcome his conscience about the air pollution caused by his work, when that is the only way to put “bread on the table tonight.” Clearly, the cry of “Who’s gonna save me?” is a plea for salvation that implies a very broad Biblical expression, not merely spiritual, but social, political and ecological as well. Several times we hear direct lyrics of dependance on God. In «King of the Mountain», where the band denounces the pop idol status that they have earned, and rather than be hung as a poster “on your bedroom wall,” they see the source of life, and: “Down the road a familiar face/ Across the wilderness/ Out further into the bush/ I will follow you.”

And in «Shakers and Movers»: “I can’t live without you love.” For Peter Garrett, a believer and an activist, there is grace in the love of God, but always near “the storm is crashing down.” Here, Midnight Oil allows musical muscle to be expressed with subtlety and restraint, where on past efforts they would have cross-cut sawed into our consciousness. Deceptively tame and musically commercial, the Oils unleash some of the most potent diatribes on total human/Christian responsibility that I have encountered apart from the books of Ron Sider and Jim Wallis.

‘Blue Sky Mining’ reminds us that Jesus intended for the meek to inherit the earth, not just what was left of it. [Brian Q. Newcomb, CCM, May 1990]

> Apple Music (https://music.apple.com/us/album/blue-sky-mining-remastered/885256737)

CD tracklist:

01. Blue Sky Mine – 4:18
02. Stars Of Warburton – 4:43
03. Bedlam Bridge – 4:25
04. Forgotten Years – 4:21
05. Mountains Of Burma – 4:50
06. King Of The Mountain – 3:58
07. River Runs Red – 5:23
08. Shakers And Movers – 4:32
09. One Country – 5:56
10. Antarctica – 4:22

Note: Simultaneously released on cassette, 12-inch vinyl LP, and CD by Columbia Records.