Midnight Oil - Land - Non-Album Tracks (1991-1996)

This is the third in my series of stray tracks albums for Australia's great band Midnight Oil.

The songs here are a grab bag of all sorts of things. Five are from B-sides. One of those, "The Band Played Waltzing Matilda," is a cover. They also do a cover of the Grateful Dead's "Wharf Rat" for a tribute album.

One, "Burnie," is from the band's "Scream in Blue Live" album, but didn't belong there, in my opinion. All the songs on that were from live shows, except this one, which was an acoustic studio track. I think it works better with these other songs.

Nearly all Midnight Oil songs are sung by Peter Garrett, the distinctively large and bald front man for the band. However, many of the band's songs are actually written or cowritten by other band members, and some of them had side projects from time to time. I generally haven't included songs from these side projects on these stray track albums, because it didn't sound like a Midnight Oil song to me if it isn't sung by Garrett. But I've made an exception here for the song by one side project band, "Someone's Singing New York, New York," by Rob Hirst and the Ghostwriters. It's a nice song, and it was a minor hit in Australia.

The title song here, "Land," was a collaborative charity single mostly done by Midnight Oil, but also with involvement by the Hothouse Flowers, the Tragically Hip, Crash Vegas, and Daniel Lanois. On my next album in this series, I include a version done just by Midnight Oil with somewhat different lyrics.

This album ends with two more cover versions, both of them officially unreleased. One is of the classic instrumental hit "Telstar" and the other is "The Good Son" by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.

01 Wharf Rat (Midnight Oil)
02 Someone's Singing New York, New York (Rob Hirst & the Ghostwriters)
03 Burnie [Acoustic Version] (Midnight Oil)
04 The Band Played Waltzing Matilda (Midnight Oil)
05 No Reaction (Midnight Oil)
06 Land (Midnight Oil & Friends)
07 Ships of Freedom (Midnight Oil)
08 I See You (Midnight Oil)
09 Smash the Wobble Board (Midnight Oil)
10 A Sunburnt Sky [A Love So High] (Midnight Oil)
11 Telstar [Instrumental] (Midnight Oil)
12 The Good Son (Midnight Oil)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16376607/MIDNGHTOL1991-1996Lnd_atse.zip.html

Midnight Oil generally puts interesting art on their album covers instead of photos of the band. For this album cover, I wanted to do something in their style. So I used the cover to the "Outbreak of Love" single. That song isn't on this album, but it is from this time period. I replaced the text in the black box at the bottom with the word "Land" taken from the "Land" single. (I otherwise didn't like the cover art for that single.)