1 out of 5

Yeah, this is some fanzine / comic shit where the comics aren’t funny, the interview are inept nad the show / music reviews are completely uninformative – at one point they interview GVSB, which was what prompted me to pick this up from the cheapie bin at the comic shop, and one of the guys mentions how it’s lazy when they’re constantly compared to Fugazi in press without any real justification… and almost every review in this rag consists of band comparisons that don’t mean shit unless you already know the band they’re talking about.  IRONY YAYY  To top it all off the presentation is just piss-poor.  I suppose there was some attempt to break up the text with different formatting / type and whatever, but poor editing aside (it is indie press, so whatever, expected) the interviews get completely lost with who’s talking and the “this wasn’t a great interview so I’ll just paraphrase” blurbs… jesus, whatever.  Look: I would glance at the ‘zines when I worked at Tower and feel sort of bad that I wasn’t supporting small press.  You can feel the same way about local bands and whatnot.  And yes, much of the mainstream is shit.  But that doesn’t change that a lot of the independent is complete tripe also.

There’s nothing overly offensive about DS, and it’s not outright boring (except for the requisite ‘on the road’ style acid trip narratives that can kiss my swear words), it just doesn’t offer anything marginally interesting.  This must be the kind of stuff that bands deal with and then can’t remember – giving minute long interviews to burnouts and then misremembering later to whom you told what and yeah that dude was cool do you remember the name of his mag?  The internet doesn’t, so make of that what you will.

I’m sorry, dudes and dude-ette types who wanted to make a go of this at the time.  I’m sure your heart was in it, and I’m 30 and single and typing blog reviews, so.  Yar.  Tears.