Men at Work

Both of these bands hail from Australia (Split Enz via New Zealand), and both have released
best-selling albums in that country. Stylistically, however, they have very little in common.
Ever since their bizarre early-Seventies beginnings, Split Enz have taken the high pop-art
road. Their specialty is decorating fetching, slyly Beatlesque hooks with the sweeping
futuristic flash of the early Roxy Music. But where Split Enz once had a tendenc... More >

They call Australia Oz because it's about as exotic as Kansas upside down, and these five sturdy-sounding, fragile-down-under blokes make the most of it. Ten thousand miles from the heart of darkness they're free to project honest, ordinary, low-level Anglo-Saxon anxiety, with enough transpositions of key and meter to establish that they've thought about it some. Call the music auxiliary Police, with more players and fewer dynamics. The words aspire to a bland compassion that sings its origins in the vaguely rebellious "Be Good Johnny," about a schoolboy who "only like[s] dreaming," and justifies its universalism by finding Australians everywhere from Brussels to Bombay. (Grade: B+)