The Terminals Uncoffined

The Terminals were a mid-late 80s-era supergroup featuring many important shards of the Kiwi underground, including core members Peter Stapleton, Mary Heney, and Ross Humphries from the very first Flying Nun release, the monumental Pin Group, joined with Susan Heney from The McGoohans, as well as Stephen Cogle from Vacuum and Victor Dimisich Band. Hard to keep all those intersections straight, that’s for sure, but this intense, brooding and ominous cadre of players have pulled together some of the darkest sounds to ever emanate from the isle. It’s hard to pick favorites with The Terminals, but ‘Uncoffined’ their debut LP recorded in 1988 seemed like the best place to start. It’s hard to believe something this dark and twisted could also be so catchy, sounding like not much else from the time, The Terminals never caught the indie rock afterglow that label mates The Clean, The Bats, or The Verlaines got, yet their catalog of dubious releases is still being discovered, even now as we speak. Remastered from the original tapes to revive what was lost in the haze of limp late 1980s studio mastering techniques, this improved version sparkles with hostility, the sheen of atmospheric shadows interlaced between tension-building crescendos, The Terminals ‘Uncoffined’ is a lost masterpiece of Antipodean dark wave pop music destined to reinstate it’s place in the annals of underground music history.