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In this age of music webzines -- both the long-running standbys and the fly-by-night variety -- it's heartening to run across a music print zine like Skyscraper. You'll hear a satisfying thunk when issue #18 lands on the desk, coffee table, nightstand or wherever you happen to toss reading material. It'll sit there for a while, too -- while far from impenetrable, at 184 pages, this massive rag will literally take weeks of sporadic reading to get through. If you're like me, you keep extra reading material at your side to tide you over while waiting for a train, cup of coffee, root canal, whatever. Skyscraper excels in this function: the sheer volume of reading material presented here guarantees that you'll find something new to read every time you pick it up.
The format is pretty straightforward: full-size, full-color cover, uncomplicated design, independent music-related advertising, interviews, features and reviews. In short, nothing you haven't seen before -- Skyscraper isn't turning any heads with innovative content or design. What is turning heads, however, is the completeness of the content. Artists interviewed include Breather Resist, The Plot To Blow Up The Eiffel Tower, Call Me Lightning, Battles, Bloc Party, ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead and Tim Kinsella, among others. These are insightful articles -- the interviewers are clearly fans of the bands they profile, yet their interviews don't devolve into masturbatory fan-worship. The fairly lengthy introductions provide a clear context for the musicians, their work and the writer's interest. The features -- on bands like The Living Blue, Isis and The Arcade Fire -- are slightly broader than the more pointed interview format, typically presenting a larger picture of the bands and their respective careers.
The articles on the better-known bands aren't going to change any minds -- Tim Kinsella's insistence that he's not purposely trying to irritate his audience will likely not come as a relief to anyone who is consistently irritated by his vocal and stage antics -- but they do provide better-than-average insight into the music. For example, Conrad Keely of Trail of Dead -- probably the only person I've ever seen stage-dive with a crash cymbal -- talks about his band's infamous stage and gear destruction: "People seemingly have this reverence for guitars, as if they have some kind of soul or life. And I just don't have that (belief) or agree with it. I have no real respect for guitars themselves, they have no intrinsic value other than to make music. I mean, a guitar really isn't special in any way, it's all what you do with it. It's total bullshit and completely idiotic to worship guitars like so many artists do."
Lesser-known and newer bands are given equal space in Skyscraper, something I find woefully uncommon in a culture with such a large emphasis on innovation. Learning about the creative process behind an amazing new piece of music, or being exposed to a scene that's just starting to come into its own -- in this case, the LA scene surrounding DIY collective club The Smell, and represented by interviews with Wives and The Mae Shi -- is often more exciting than learning more about a band you already love (or hate, as the case may be). Again, the writers do a great job making their case about each group; not once did I leave an interview still wondering whether or not I should care about a particular group.
There's also a third type of article in Skyscraper: the career retrospective. This issue takes a look at the contributions of Unbroken, Galaxie 500 and Brian Eno. Serving as veritable histories of the artists, these articles are slightly more objective than the interviews and features, but it's still clear that these musicians deserve your attention.
And then there are the reviews: 54 pages of album reviews, divided into new releases, reissues and featured reviews, plus a few reviews each of live shows, DVDs and books. With over 250 different records to choose from, you're sure to find something interesting. However, this is where my biggest gripe with print zines comes into play: many music fans, myself included, demand timeliness from their music reviews -- but with print magazines' time consuming production process, not to mention the sporadic schedule of irregular zines like Skyscraper, many of the reviews are out of date by the time they reach the readers (and it doesn't help if I forget to send the magazine to a reviewer for a few weeks, either -- Ed.). Skyscraper #18 is dated Spring 2005, but there are many records that made big splashes on year-end-features back in December 2004. I've got the same gripe with Punk Planet and Maximum Rocknroll, and freely admit that the immediacy of the internet has completely changed music fans' expectations. My suggestion? Make these magazines dual-format, with more timely reviews on a website and featured reviews included in the print version. That said, it's clear that their reviewers know the bands and the music they review just as fully as the interviewers and feature writers know the bands they've written about.
Skyscraper's strength isn't in its size, nor in its editors' dogged perseverance in publishing an irregular print zine in this internet-mad information age, but in the completeness and consistency of approach through all its departments. Skyscraper is a hefty rag that doesn't waste an ounce.
-- Andrew Mall
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