The Terminals – Uncoffined
Flying Nun’s recent resurgence and subsequent repressings have required a keen eye to follow where they pop up, HoZac enters the ring as the latest to offer up one of the catalog’s sorely overlooked artists. The Terminals featured members of The more acerbic Pin Group alongside members of the lesser known Victor Dimisich Band and The McGoohans. They too would eventually go down the same noisy, post-punk route as The Pin Group, but on their first two albums they maintained a sound that fell down the same jangle-pop hallways as fellow NZ stalwarts The Clean, The Chills, Able Tasmans or The Verlaines. The shift in sound seemed to stem from the departure of guitarist Ross Humphries, also of Bailter Space and The Great Unwashed, but his inclusion here marks some of the band’s more buoyant offerings.
No mention of The Terminals would be complete, though, without placing a fair amount of credit for the band’s allure to vocalist Stephen Cogle, whose rich tenor/baritone fluctuation and tender quaver adds a welcoming extension of kinship and understanding to the band’s jangle-pop offerings. Despite all the band had going for them, they remain one of the more overlooked bits of the Flying Nun and Xpressway catalogs despite best attempts of a few worthwhile CD reissues and comps compiled through the aughts. Beginning with this debut finding its way back to the vinyl format, though, its starting to look up for the band’s legacy. The record’s been remastered from its original tapes and the sound gets a proper scrub-up in quality, bringing out the subtle brilliance of this antipodean classic. Twenty-five years later, maybe this is the time for The Terminals.
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