The formula is quite simple: You hit the big beat with a big stick and score big points with big guitars and a big mouth. Indignant rage is the coin of the realm; dignified outrage is usually the whine of the tired and tiresome. In the best rock & roll, especially the protest kind, subtlety doesn't count.

Blue Sky Mining is the exception that defies and redefines the rule. As immediate in its topicality and unflinching in its message as any other Midnight Oil record, the album is a stunning issue-driven document of fear, anger and commitment delivered with artful musical restraint and tempered vocal fury. It's a new strategy for this Aussie band – and Blue Sky Mining is all the more compelling for it.

This is by no means a polite album, just as Midnight Oil is by no means a polite band. The Oils, fronted by chrome-domed dynamo and veteran activist Peter Garrett, have long epitomized the renegade nature of modern Australian rock with a big noise that combines heavy barband manners with articulate songwriting, informed lyric ire and indomitable outlaw pride. (They didn't call their 1979 Aussie LP Head Injuries for nothing.) Over the years, the members of Midnight Oil have refined those manners with increasing studio finesse and greater emotional depth without muting their attack or dulling the force of their socio-eco-political argument, as the band's U.S. breakthrough album, 1987's Diesel and Dust, so eloquently proved.

Still, it's a long jump from that record's deftly commercial mix of snarl and polish to Blue Sky Mining's altered states of emergency. In "Bedlam Bridge," a slow heartbeat rhythm, storm-cloud keyboards and the distant howling of an anguished guitar mirror a bleak cityscape ravaged by random violence and moral decay. "River Runs Red" stops along the same nightmare trail with an icy depiction of corporate greed and wanton earth rape, rendered with frosty guitar and keyboard arpeggios and Peter Garrett's enraged hiss ("So we came and conquered and found/Riches of commons and kings/Who strangled and wrestled the ground/But they never put anything back"). In "Mountains of Burma," Garrett ruefully surveys the mess below the cloud line ("Bills fall due for the industrial revolution/Scorch the earth till the earth surrenders") over a forced-march beat while Armageddon strings swell up behind him.

Blue Sky Mining isn't all sackcloth and ashes. Just as Midnight Oil hit the ground running on Diesel and Dust with the clarion brass and bullish locomotion of "Beds Are Burning," the band jump-starts this album with "Blue Sky Mine," a slice of vintage Oils ruckus 'n' roll stripped to muscular garage-rock essentials, with the metallic squeal of a Yardbirds-style harp thrown in for good measure. "Forgotten Years" and "King of the Mountain" both find the band in familiar beer-barn overdrive, powered by Jim Moginie and Martin Rotsey's lusty guitar clamor and the twin rhythm engine of drummer Rob Hirst and bassist Bones Hillman.

But where earlier Oils LPs like 10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1 and Red Sails in the Sunset crackled like London Calling meets Who's Next, Blue Sky Mining is roughly the band's equivalent to The Joshua Tree, an accessible but uncompromising work of subdued mood and meticulous craft underscored by bristling intensity and punctuated by trademark Oils bursts of concentrated urgency. The band members whisper when you expect them to scream; then, when you're up to your ear lobes in quiet dismay, they give you a swift kick of celebratory defiance like "King of the Mountain." The Oils are also no less righteous than U2, or the Clash or the Who for that matter, in pressing their case for standing firm and proud amid rising ruin. The star of "Bedlam Bridge" is "a man ... never breathless/No ambition ever hopeless." "Forgotten Years" flashes forward to a salvageable future: "Still it aches like tetanus/It reeks of politics/Signatures stained with tears/Who can remember, we've got to remember/The hardest years, the darkest years."

Blue Sky Mining is a dark album for hard times, an album of desperate measures set to music unmistakably charged with fighting spirit and a bold unpredictability. And while the Oils may not rail as long and loud on record as they used to, they've never pretended that volume and vitriol alone can win this kind of war. "Don't talk in maybes/Don't talk in hasbeens/Sing it like it should be," Garrett declares at one point in the solidarity call "One Country." On Blue Sky Mining, Midnight Oil sings it like it is. You should listen in kind. (RS 572)

DAVID FRICKE