Devil in the Woods #1.1 $2.95 CONTACT: Devil In The Woods Magazine c/o Subscription Department P.O. Box 6217 Albany, CA, USA 94706 Devil in the Woods website Subscriptions: $6.66/year

How do you define the border between zine and magazine? It's not really a question of quality; I assume we've all read some amazing zines and some terrible magazines. Is it a question of polish? Size? Attitude? Intent?

Devil in the Woods does a neat balancing act, combining most of the best qualities of both: it has the visual appeal of a high-end magazine and the scrappy, smart-assed sincerity of a photocopied zine. Yeah, there's a fancy four-color cover, but the pages are newsprint and you still get the feeling that the ink is getting on your hands (because it is)...

A stepchild of the venerable and worthy Snackcake, DiW allows Mike Cloward, Peter Ellenby and their cohorts to blaze new trails in print; Snackcake, meanwhile, has made the more cost-efficient transition to the web. DiW 1.1 pleases with its comparative lack of scene-centricity. Yeah, indie darlings Pedro the Lion are interviewed, and Burning Airlines' J. Robbins gets some more press time, but I found these articles genuinely informative as opposed to the "look who I'm interviewing, look how cool I am" fodder available elsewhere. Other interviewees include Janet Weiss of Quasi/Sleater-Kinney, Sebadoh, Sloan, Mogwai and the Chemikal Underground crew. The conversation with Dumptruck's Seth Tiven is perhaps DiW's most interesting article; Dumptruck's story is bittersweet and fascinating. Intelligently, DiW makes no overt efforts (beyond the interview itself) to push Dumptruck's new album, Terminal, which is on their label.

Queens of the Stone Age, interviewed for the cover feature, strike me as a pretty daring choice. I've got to tip my hat to the mag for avoiding obvious indie-bait in favor of these guys, and the article may even have inspired me to give QoTSA's stuff another try.

You say you don't have the attention span for interviews? The inspired "Rock 'N' Roll Moments" (essentially a music-biased spin on Letterman's "brushes with greatness") is hysterical -- especially Peter Beck's antagonistic run-in with the Damned's Rat Scabies. "13 Questions" makes its titular inquiries to several different artists (including Kitty Craft's Pam Valfer) and allows you to compare their answers and/or marvel at how irritating the Beta Band's glib replies seem after three sets of serious answers. List-lovers can enjoy the mag's "Top Sixes", while those who've gotten tired of reading about music can enjoy a good laugh -- and some pictures of (clothed-but-mostly-impressive) breasts -- in Ricky Del Norteno's "Dirty Old Man Lessons", which advances the (chauvinistic but amusing) concept of grading passing mammaries using the names of characters from "Hogan's Heroes".

The predictable reviews page makes an enjoyable read, and is notable for (mostly) avoiding personal-agenda vitrol in favor of discussing the actual music. This is a welcome change, though I've got no way of knowing how cool DiW's writers are if they don't use their reviews to tell me...

And DiW's downside? Not much. Some of the articles, especially the interviews, seem a bit truncated -- they end just as they're getting interesting. I have no idea if this is an editorial issue or a writer thing, though the overall standard of the zine suggests a pretty hands-on approach to quality. And speaking of hands-on, don't touch high-tech circuitry, freshly-painted walls or your best friend's wife after reading DiW -- you'll leave big dirty black fingerprints on everything. Such is the price of being cutting edge.

At the ludicrously low price of US$6.66 for a one-year (4 issue) subscription, Devil in the Woods is really too good to pass up. If it was possible to subscribe online, I'd probably have signed up well before I received my review copy of issue 1.1. Those of you in need of more convincing should visit the DiW website, where you can sample most of these articles yourself. It's almost worth it just for the fun of writing a check for $6.66, which is sure to terrify any low-IQ born-agains on your bank's staff.

Reviewed by George Zahora