Copper Press #2 US$2.95 CONTACT: Contact info: Steve Brydges Copper Press 214 W. 7th Street Gaylord, MI 49735 email: steve@copperpress.com http://www.copperpress.com $12 ($20 outside the U.S.) gets you one year/four issues of Copper Press, plus the choice of a free CD.

Browsing through a zine stand at your local record store, bookstore, supermarket or wherever is no longer a simple affair. It requires hours of grueling work to figure out what to spend your hard earned $2.95 on. New specialty magazines seem to be popping up daily, all with the aim of reeling you into their printed world of super-reality...

I have a suggestion for you weary magazine hounds out there: take your $2.95 and some initiative and go find yourself a copy of Copper Press #2.

You'll find a superb zine with a marvelous layout and top-notch content. Issue #2 features cover art by Chicago illustrator/artist Jay Ryan. Ryan, whose work just happens to adorn this writer's walls, contributes a wicked collage of battling, hockey-stick-wielding rabbits to this issue's cover. Inside Copper Press you'll find a probing interview with producer extraordinaire/Burning Airlines frontman J. Robbins, a gleaming feature on the brilliant (though now defunct) Chicago trio Neutrino and an in-depth interview with the aforementioned Jay Ryan. All articles are laid out with aesthetically pleasing, yet reader-functional design, which essentially means they look cool and are easier to read than anything you'll find in Raygun.

About the only place Copper Press loses any points is with the thematically-inclined album reviews. These reviews, while inventive and amusing, sometimes stray into the realm of fiction, offering no clue as to the sound or quality of the record in question and many times confusing the readers as to what they might hear if they choose to purchase the album in question. An example:

That gripe aside, Copper Press #2 is worth mining your local record and book stores for -- and really, can you think of a better way to spend $2.95? I didn't think so.

Reviewed by Jason Jackowiak