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BANDOPPLER #3
edited by Chris Estey
($4.50,
www.bandoppler.com)
Review by Tim O'Neil
This is an impressive magazine. Squarebound, about 8" x 9", with just over eighty pages of material,
Bandoppler represents the missing link between semi-professional zine and glossy music mag. There is a lot of hard work and good writing - as well as some so-so writing, some indulgent humor and some bad cartooning – between these two cardstock covers. It would be a bargain at twice the price.
Magazines like these serve as a showcase for all sorts of really cool indie music ads. There are pages and pages of well-designed ads for bands you’ve never heard of or have only read about, with their album covers featured in beautiful black and white. You will never hear most of these bands, and yet to see their album covers is to be reassured that a generation of art-and-design school graduates have indeed found something creative to do in the long evenings following their shifts at Wendy’s. Does it seem disingenuous to be gushing about the ads? It isn’t: these indie labels create some gorgeous print ads, and if you don’t read
The Wire, this might be the
only time you will ever see an ad for Lujo Records. It looks like someone put a lot of time and effort into it, and it is beautiful.
There are lengthy features on They Might Be Giants and Richard Hell, with shorter features on Nick Cave, Dave Edwards and Craig Thompson (of
Blankets fame), just to name a few. The quality of the writing ranges from better-than-
Spin (the Thompson and TMBG profiles) to lukewarm blog leftovers (many of the smaller profiles), but there’s an infectious enthusiasm throughout.
When
Bandoppler hits, it hits hard. I thought that after all these years there really was nothing new I could possibly read on the subject of They Might Be Giants, and yet Chris Estey and Jason Dodd managed to construct a compulsively readable piece on the band. By focusing on the creation of the
Gigantic documentary, Estey and Dodd managed to explore a surprisingly rich facet of the group’s strange and eminently articulate career. Similarly, Dodd’s profile of Craig Thompson was very interesting. It focused on the influence of evangelical Christianity on Thompson’s art, and a canny understanding of this oft-misinterpreted and poisonously insular community made for a revealing piece.
The good in
Bandoppler definitely outweighs the bad. The comic strips and spot illustrations aren’t much to write home about. The seemingly endless parade of profiles on obscure bands are grist for the mill with this type of zine, so I suppose I shouldn’t complain too much. As a music critic myself, I certainly understand the deadening dullness of an endless stream of new bands, but that doesn’t mean that
someone won’t get really hyped by reading about Denali or Ion Dissonance.
Zines are designed to let people who are enthusiastic about certain things rant and rave to their heart’s content. This is obviously both a blessing and a curse. Thankfully,
Bandoppler's blessings are copious indeed, as there’s enough quality writing to make you forget about the poor.
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