So it looks like my all-time favorite band, Midnight Oil, is releasing re-masters of their entire catalogue! That’s 17 albums! Here’s what their website says…
According to Jim Moginie who has been busy overseeing the project, revisiting original tapes and working with producers Nick Launay and Warne Livesey to ensure that everything sounds as good as it can;
“a lot of these [older] records were made for vinyl, so a lot of the frequencies were cut out because there were certain sounds you couldn’t put on records. This was a good chance to get them back up to scratch, because now we can make them as loud and big sounding as [we] want, with all the added depth using the original master tapes. It’s the audiophile nerd side of us that accounts for some of that.”
This is amazingly awesome for me. I bought each of their albums on cassette tape up until the 90s when I got a CD player. I literally played some of them to death. Once I started collecting everything on CD I would occassionally find one of their older albums in the “great price” bin. Sometimes I would grab two of these so I could give one away.
I’ve been intending to write a full day’s worth of reading on my love affair with the Oils, but just simply haven’t had the time. If you’ve never been a true fan of something — completely passionate about a hero, a motivator, an artist — you cannot comprehend what these guys meant to me. These albums had so much to say. I couldn’t listen without questioning my own politics and ethics.
I had the good fortune of seeing them in Kansas City in 2002, just months before they broke up. The show was incredible. They played songs from recent albums, but also gave us some real treats with a few selections from their early (angry) years. They even played one I thought I’d never hear live, Brave Faces. [Flower people were so beautiful, but straight and loud’s the way!] They played the night before in St. Louis. I had thoughts of going but then, for a lot of reasons, I didn’t. I still really regret that decision because they finished that show with Lucky Country, another song I never thought I’d hear live. To get you into the feel of this band, here’s the performance of Lucky Country at MTV Unplugged. You’re going to want to watch all the way to the end of the video. Good stuff! Oh, and you might want some lyrics to go with it.
(The guy playing the slide is Jim Moginie, the fella who’s quoted above.)
Infinitewell 