Music Review - The Terminals - "Last Days of the Sun"

[southerndave]

One of the great missed opportunities of popular music is that the Vacuum never got around to releasing any records. Because, just going by the quality of the output of all the groups which can trace their musical family tree back to the Vacuum, if that group had ever put out a record it could well have been something fairly bloody good

Comments

[primary_benelux]

I found your journal at random while trying to look for other people's thoughts on this album and I think I'm in complete agreement with you. As for Last Visible Dog, they're based out Providence, Rhode Island here in the States and most of their output is experimental in nature -- the Terminals might be the most conventional record they've ever released.

[southerndave]

Thanks for the message. I did have a quick look at the record company web site and the other groups I recognised were the Renderers (who might be one of the most listenable country and western groups around, but are still country and western for all that) and the Dead C (who are simply too weird for me to have any great liking for them

[primary_benelux]

I think Last Visible Dog seems to be this decade's answer to the Siltbreeze label -- Americans offering up mostly experimental weirdness but the occasional bit of NZ treasures.
I'm sure I'm not the only one with Yazoo and Roy Montgomery in my collection! My old friend Eve probably has both of those, too.
The Terminals were among a number of Kiwi groups that I've been aware of but never had the opportunity to listen to until recently. I don't think anything else of theirs has ever been in print in the States. In fact, most records from Flying Nun/Xpressway/Propeller have probably never received distribution here, which has made it difficult for me to track down physical copies of something like Blam Blam Blam, Bird Nest Roys, or Look Blue Go Purple (and forget about even trying to find something like The Victor Dimisich Band!). Only The Clean, The Chills, The Verlaines, the aforementioned Roy Montgomery (and everything he's been involved with from The Pin Group onward), The Dead C., The 3-D's, The Renderers and Pumice have had any sort

[southerndave]

I think the only Siltbreeze CD I've got in my collection is Pin Group's compilation. Not sure if it ever actually got distributed over here... in the last couple of years I've bought a lot of second hand CDs off Trade Me (the local version of Ebay) and this was one of a large number I bought off one collector who seems to have bought most of his CDs in Europe.

Most people I know don't have Roy Montgomery in their collection (they probably wouldn't even know who he is!) and Yazoo are a largely forgotten group over here - they never had a major hit in New Zealand (I think "Nobody's Diary" might have scraped the bottom reaches of the top 20 for a couple of weeks, but that's about it).

The only Victor Dimisich Band anything I've ever managed to find was the Mekong Delta Blues cassette tape on Xpressway something like 15 or so years ago now. Other than that, "Native Waiter" has shown up on a couple of compilations (Xpressway Pile-Up and the otherwise rather disappointing Flying Nun 25th anniversary boxed set).

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