Here we have a cool zine from Belgium, which is free in person or a mere few bucks to cover postage costs (it's only $2 for those of us in the US)! I've never even heard of this magazine before, but I'm glad it showed up in my mailbox because it's really quite nice, covering hardcore and associated styles with the general content of reviews, interviews, news, and columns. As always most of the news is a little outdated in the print format, but there are actually some scarce bits and pieces in there that were very informative and new to me, which was awesome. Three pages of brief columns appear early on, tending to deal mainly with personal issues. And honestly the writing's not bad, but I still would've preferred to just see more reviews or another band interview instead. Most of the interviews are around two pages (with compact layouts so there's a good amount of content), some a little more, some a little less. I found most of the talks to be fairly interesting thanks to a combination of solid questions from the writers (nothing too prying, but trying to stay from the generic standards) and bands putting thought into their answers. The reviews are slightly too brief for me, but better than average because they are honest... these kids can get pretty hard on a good number of records, which is a must. They could definitely be more literally descriptive of the music, but at times they do talk about the artwork and things like that, so they're on the right path. Overall the magazine displays a great layout with small, clean text that's easy to read in cooperation with nice graphics and arrangements. There are a fair amount of ads inside, but since there are tons of ads for European bands and labels that I'm not familiar with that works out great in my opinion, and it's basically a free zine that's better quality than most of the ones you can buy, so fuck it! Awesome full color outer covers seal the deal and really make for an eye-catching presentation. This issue is admittedly a bit short, I read it in its entirety in just over an hour or so, maybe a little more, but apparently there was a rush to get this out in time for a festival, so I think things tend to be more lengthy under normal circumstances. Either way, I certainly hope to see future issues of Bullet, because there aren't that many prominent hardcore zines from Europe that are easy to come by in te US like this. Good stuff.
[zine]
Running time - n/a, Tracks: n/a
[Notable tracks: n/a]
Bullet - http://www.bulletmag.com
