tQ’s Reissues Etc. of the Year 2025 (In Association with Norman Records)

Sometimes the Oscars get it right. Daniel Blumberg’s music for Brady Corbet’s American epic The Brutalist – winner of the Academy Award for Best Score earlier this year – is as grandiose and sly as the film itself, taking on grand themes as deftly as it does the traumatised internal voice of the film’s protagonist, Holocaust survivor László Tóth. 

Looking as though they had beamed down from another planet into the midst of the punk era, early Split Enz were an intriguing mix of progressive and art rock with a flamboyant theatricality that harked back to the era of music halls and crooning vocalists. This box set release presents remasters of their first album, Mental Notes, alongside their second, Second Thoughts, which reworked some of the first album’s material under the direction of producer Phil Manzanera of Roxy Music. There’s also a collection of the band’s formative singles and a disc of previously unreleased and rare material, including newly remixed live recordings from the band’s 1975 Ormond Hall show. At their best (‘Titus’, ‘Late Last Night’, ‘Walking Down A Road’ and ‘Matinee Idyll’), Split Enz were utterly unique, a high point of mid-70s ‘rock as art’ with fabulous tunes to go with their outlandish attire.

Collecting “45s, compilation tracks and assorted ephemera”, this fifteen-track release offers a more succinct and compelling argument for the relatively obscure San Francisco band World Of Pooh’s scrappy charms than their only album, The Land Of Thirst. There are some fantastic covers, including 100 Flowers’ ‘Strip Club’, Blue Oyster Cult’s ‘Dominance & Submission’, (allegedly played from “LSD-addled” memory rather than the original recording) and Half Japanese’s ‘Acupuncture’, but the two best tracks are Barbara Manning originals. Manning (also of 28th Day, SF Seals, and The Go-Luckys!) is on fine voice throughout, but her vocals on low-key cautionary tale ‘Someone Wants You Dead’ and the impossible-not-to-sing-along-to jangly slice of Americana, ‘Stones Of Judgement’ are truly sublime.

In some camps, this was the surprise of the year: a full unreleased album from John McKay, best known as Siouxsie & The Banshees’ hugely influential first guitarist. Dating from 1980 to 1989, these eleven tracks showcase McKay’s miraculous ability to make sense of musical chaos, led by the jagged, abrasive guitar that helped define the sound of post-punk.

Alongside post-rock outfits Hesse Kassel and Candelabro, who have had significant crossover to English-speaking audiences with their 2025 albums, this split by Cóclea and Canut de Bon showcases the dynamism of the Chilean capital’s new garde. Two absolute gun noise rock bands, Cóclea and Canut de Bon, play off each other so well here. They match each other’s manic creative energies blow-for-blow – Cóclea impose, with their sound, a bastard son of Unwound and King Crimson, whilst Canut de Bon startle with the most bloodthirsty, thrashy emo you ever could hear. It’s grimy, gristly riffs galore from all corners. 

That ‘Goodbye Horses’ has maintained such a grip on the public imagination for over three decades is entirely understandable. The androgyny of Q Lazzarus’ voice contrasts provocatively yet sublimely with the Buffalo Bill scene in Silence Of The Lambs, reflecting the character’s self-image and to what extent this contrasts with how the viewer sees them. ‘Goodbye Horses’ quite rightly maintains an enduring presence in underground culture, reappearing in covers by Kele Okereke, Wild Beasts and MGMT. The song’s theme is transcendence – rising above those who see the world as only earthly and finite – an interesting and somewhat direct contrast to the themes in Q’s cover of ‘Heaven’ by Talking Heads. Both of these tracks in particular highlight a juxtaposition key to her work: deeply soulful vocals contending with beauty and loss. This kinship is shared with other African American musicians and artists who have the ability to merge the deeply spiritual with the unsettling, and reflects themes explored in Leila Taylor’s Darkly: Black History And America’s Gothic Soul, which examines how esoteric themes, gothic aesthetics, and modernity converge in such cultural narratives.

Eva Leblanc has been a deeply valuable and powerful presence in the UK hardcore community of late, with her band Traidora releasing an excellent debut LP in September of this year. She also dabbles in more abstract and less moshworthy musical styles, and as a guitarist that’s what she contributes here – her electronically-treated playing backs up the spoken word barrage of Eve Libertine. Best known as a member of anarcho punk progenitors Crass (this 2024 live recording was part of an exhibition on the group), Libertine revisits a number of their songs, her voice as cut-glass as it’s militant; the whole document is the most essential update of the Crass agenda to have been distributed for a long time.

Among T.P. Orchestre Poly-Rythmo’s most prized and – until now – rarest releases is this 1977 album, a collaboration with Malian saxophonist Tidiani Kone which collates two side-length pieces of contrasting style but identically involving intensity. Side one, ‘Djanfa Magni (La Trahison N’est Pas Bonne)’, shows the influence of their friend and mentor Fela Kuti but, thanks mainly to an electric organ that, at times, imitates the sound of a vibraphone, would not have felt out of place if bits of it had been interpolated by European groove-centric experimentalists of the Can or The Fall schools. ‘Fangate Djangele’, meanwhile, adopts a more shuffling, syncopated style, perhaps displaying as much influence from Caribbean musics as the A-side owes to American funk and psych. Taken as a whole, the record is hypnotic, compelling and consistently thrilling, as the group’s trademark polyrhythms collide and cajole, and the brass top-line instruments add accented melodic punctuation.

Recorded at Cargo Studios in August 1979 when Vini Reilly was encouraged to get together with producer Martin Hannett, the experiment involving the two resulted in one of Factory Records’ early masterpieces alongside Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures. Jon Savage has called that LP “a definitive Northern Gothic statement: guilt-ridden, romantic, claustrophobic”.  As if to offer some light to counter that dark, The Return Of The Durutti Column begins with the sound of a bird. “’Sketch For Summer’ was made up in the studio because Martin managed to get these bird noises on the synthesiser,” Reilly recalled. The track remains one of the pair’s most majestic pieces with Reilly’s distinctive classical guitar arpeggios suspended in space by Hannett’s electronic trickery.

Born from a meeting between documentarian Bill Perrine and Nyahh Records label head Willie Stewart and sourced from UCSD’s archives, The Alien Territory Archives compiles previously unreleased works by artists belonging to the 1970s San Diego scene. The four CDs feature several inclusions that, not without a sense of thrill, expand the canons of familiar composers, sometimes in unexpected directions. Like the book it accompanies, this set of music is scholarly, enthralling, and exhaustive.

The Sacred Harp, a songbook first printed in 1844, full of hundreds of hymns, pslam tunes, anthems and more, and which lends its name to the sublime shape-note choral singing style, has inspired reams of wonderful music over the decades. Even within such a rich history, Jackie O Motherfucker’s 2005 LP Flags Of The Sacred Harp stands among the finest. Even after two decades, the way the songbooks’ sublime melodies rise into earshot and then fade again into the band’s wider abstracted sweep is utterly beautiful.

Listening to this stuff – recorded between 1987 and 1994 – with a 2020s citizen’s instant access to historical context, you can grant that Death Side were not totally nonpareil. In a country whose hardcore scene did extreme noise arguably better than any other, G.I.S.M stand out as a band who folded grandiose heavy metal solos into their batter before these Tokyo lads did. Plenty of their output, especially that collected on various artists comps in the late 80s, is also evidently post-Discharge, or Discharge’s dishevelled offspring like Chaos UK (with whom Death Side later shared a split album). Guitar player and main songwriter Hiroyuki Kishida, better known as Chelsea, is a reasonable shout for greatest ever hardcore punk soloist, peppering these songs with warp-speed classical gas attacks that are like if Quorthon had been tricked into joining Anti-Cimex. Chelsea died in 2007 and this immense release is dedicated to him.

Ciśnienie’s latest live record captures the demonic Polish quintet at their absolute best. A musical exorcism, the group blitz free jazz, noise rock, and drone metal across four dramatic, scorched compositions that sound equal parts deathly threatening and totally cathartic. And, of course, each staggering, breathless piece is only heightened by the sound of three or four people ecstatically clapping inside the Katowice Music Hub Atrium. 

Bulbous Monocle continue their great run of TFUL282 reissues with the San Francisco-based indie/noise/psych-rock unit’s second album. A more cohesive affair than its predecessor, Wormed By Leonard, Tangle largely restricts its weirder improvisational moments to the openings of songs, rather than presenting them as individual tracks as the band did on later releases, making for a more easily digestible whole from start to finish. There are some great tracks on here, including the rockabilly shuffle with incendiary noise-guitar solo of ‘Sister Hell’ and the clangorous racket of Sonic Youth-esque ‘Sports Car’. Best of the lot, the five-minute mini-epic ‘Change Your Mind’, combines a wonderfully emotive guitar figure with a hooky vocal chorus and some feral-sounding shouted non-sequiturs.

Even if it were not attached to one of the greatest American films of the 1970s, the soundtrack to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre would still deserve to be regarded as a milestone in noise or industrial music. Long thought to be lost to the winds, this is the first ever official release of the 1974 score by those wizards at Waxwork after the tapes were rediscovered in 2023, and they did a top notch job with restoring them as this musique (dragged over) concrete sounds like a million dollars. Aluminium pots and pans, suspended cymbals, animal calls, rattles and a variety of drums plus field recordings are subjected to what sounds like a Hermann Nitsch warehouse’s worth of reverb creating a cacophonous and nerve-shredding otherworldly dub and catastrophic anti-Gamelan. And, leaning into the theme of the film – the dehumanising horror of the industrialised slaughter of animals – Tobe Hooper and Wayne Bell manage to make a sonic case for vegetarianism much more strongly than The Smiths ever did with the title track from Meat Is Murder. 

Is Kōenjihyakkei’s Angherr Shisspa the greatest Zeuhl album ever made? It could be. I happen to think it is… although it’s debatable how much that actually counts for. So, any noise created that helps celebrate this excellent 20th anniversary reissue is not just good for the stature of the album but also for Zeuhl in general, as it is itself a largely overlooked genre. ‘What is Zeuhl?’ you might feel justified in asking. Zeuhl is a moody and bass-driven hybrid of jazz fusion, prog rock and chamber music, typically featuring complex compositions which slough off conventional song structures and apply operatic vocals. This form requires a lot, even from virtuoso musicians. In reality though any definition of Zeuhl is a closed loop because this is music that sounds like Magma; and the term means ‘celestial’ in the French band’s imagined ‘alien’ language Kobaïan.

The fact that Cardiacs haven’t ended, even after all this time, is hugely gratifying for all involved, and hopefully for the fans too, both long-time fans, and the new ones this release will surely attract. More than two decades on from their last studio release, Smith’s fusion of prog, punk, rock and psych structures within relatively short pop-shaped tunes sounds as singular as ever. There are other bands who on paper seem similar, such as California-era Mr Bungle, early Split Enz, or Chicago’s Cheer-Accident, but really Cardiacs are still out on their own, not so much ahead of time as outside of it, both back in the day and the present moment.  

This Ché-SHIZU recording was made in Osaka on 16 September and was up on Bandcamp two days later, under the artist name Kansai Ché-SHIZU (I’m not sure what that tweaked band name is about). The line up was a trio of the band’s stalwart founder Chie Mukai (lest we forget, a student of Takehisa Kosugi in that legendary stint that produced Marginal Consort and their precursor East Bionic Symphonia), alongside Tall Grass label head Yonju Miyaoka on guitar and Harry Terukina on drums. Characteristically loose and lovely for it, the set tightens up as it goes, Mukai’s er-hu (a Chinese two stringed fiddle) giving that tipsy lean as she swings around a riff, which is at its best on final track ‘葡萄園’ (‘Vineyard’) from 1993’s Nazareth.

Da Mind of Traxman Vol. 3 propels footwork into more experimental and uncharted musical territory. This makes it a counterpart to his fellow Teklife artist, the late DJ Rashad’s highly praised Double Cup, in that it amplifies footwork’s signature production techniques and applies them to entirely unexplored material. ‘Kill Da DJ’, a collaboration with younger producers, kicks off the album with a glimpse of how club scene tastes have evolved in recent decades. But in the next track, ‘Trax Da Prophet’ , he returns to a more familiar terrain, with soulful R&B influences punctuated by 808 drum beats. ‘I’ll Write The Hook’, sampling Benny the Butcher’s ‘Bust a Brick Nick’, takes the combative verses and splinters them into an even more confrontational war anthem. ‘Trust Me’ is one of those hilarious peaks discernible throughout footwork, and of course, in Traxman’s catalogue in particular.