*** Midnight Oil

REDNECK WONDERLAND

(Sony)

Midnight Oil may never again achieve as potent a mix of music and message as they did on their visceral classics 10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1 and Diesel & Dust, but they're gonna bleed their guts out trying. This CD's "White Skin Black Heart," with its charges of neo-Nazism, is the most potent hate letter any '90s outfit has written to race-baiting politicians. "Seeing Is Believing" doesn't just grieve for a soiled Earth -- it's also about the way we've polluted the human spirit through the relentless exploitation of, well, everything. For that matter, the whole album, with its mournful portraits of corporate egotists at the helm and ineffectual statesmen and complacent citizens, is a bleak, bleak, bleak view of modern times reinforced by Peter Garrett's atypically low-key vocal delivery and the CD's high population of ballads and minor-key melodies.

Which puts Redneck Wonderland (in stores this Tuesday) in a bind. Midnight Oil are always best when they rock, which they've done with brass-knuckled authority -- even when singing about genocide -- and which has helped keep the group from seeming too preachy and dour. But it's obvious from these lyrics that Garrett and crew now think we're all about to be left swinging in the wind. And rocking out might trivialize that, or encourage some listeners to cruise over the meanings of these 12 tales. It's a tricky balance -- setting music and message to equal weight. Here, message tips the scales.

-- Ted Drozdowski