(SYDNEY) -- They once rocked New York's Exxon building, but Australian veterans Midnight Oil are following a more laid-back route through their homeland this summer. With a surf film opening their shows and a palsied stand-up japester adding comic relief, Midnight Oil have created the complete suburban night out -- beer and barbied prawns optional. |

While they devote the second half of their two-hour show to pushing their tenth album, Redneck Wonderland (not yet slated for a U.S. release), Midnight Oil haven't abandoned their earliest hits, which are documented on last year's 20,000 Watts RSL anthology.

Redneck Wonderland, which takes its title from graffiti splattered just outside Melbourne, is a curious mix of spooky electronics and white-knuckled riffing, with rants against apathy and bigotry ("Comfortable Place On the Couch", "Cemetery In My Mind") rubbing shoulders with more ambient moodpieces ("Return To Sender" and "Blot"). Producer Warne Livesey, who worked on both 1987's Diesel & Dust and 1990's Blue Sky Mining, again mans the boards (with local groovemeister Magoo), while the band has tapped into a new motherlode of local political issues on which to vent their spleen.

"Midnight Oil is at its most convincing when it's pissed off," drummer Rob Hirst said in a recent statement, and Redneck Wonderland displays their current anger. However, the band isn't just expressing their ire through power chords, thunderstruck rhythms and mightily vexed lyrics. They're getting political and taking a stand.

Australia is currently in the grip of what's known locally as Hanson-itis -- not the three blond popsters, but rather Pauline Hanson, the much-hated leader of Queensland's anachronistic One Nation Party. That group's scattergun plans for social reforms -- out with unwed mothers, cut off retired politicians' benefits -- and a strictly whites-only policy, have sullied the country's reputation as a melting pot of cultures and broad minds.

Perhaps in response, the veteran rockers' chrome-domed frontman and mouthpiece Peter Garrett has also re-entered public office, being reinstated as president of the Australian Conservation Foundation following a five-year hiatus. Shortly after, Midnight Oil -- along with local acts Regurgitator and Coloured Stone -- rocked the site of a proposed mine in Kakadu, a slice of heaven in Australia's Northern Territory.

In some ways the guys in Midnight Oil are mellowing -- just a little -- in their rocking middle age. During the 20,000 Watts segment of their live show, the band spins a wheel onstage to determine exactly which songs they'll play. At a recent concert at Sydney's Selinas, the dial landed on "Progress," from the band's 1985 EP Species Deceases. The band repeated the intro no less than five times before Garrett scratched his shiny scalp and asked the rest of the Oils, "How does it start again?" (Jeff Apter)