MANDRAGORA

First of all, I have to be honest here…I’m not into the musical style that’s featured in this publication. After reading through this, I saw very little that I would wanna add to my CD collection. But, then again, when someone does their own magazine, it’s usually based around the editor’s own personal tastes or with a specific audience in mind. Anyway, this is your typical underground fanzine with the black and white, xeroxed pages. I didn’t bother to count the pages, but, there’s a lot of reading material here, that’s for sure. The layout and print quality is pretty cool. It’s one of the better publications in this style that I’ve seen. Thumbs up for that. Now, even though we don’t seem to share the same musical taste, I really got into this publication because of the writing style. A good example of what I mean is the interview with King Diamond, who happens to be an artist that I also admire. Anyway, this interview seemed more like a conversation between two friends instead of an actual interview. It’s almost like you get to see another side of King Diamond that you don’t usually see. As I went through some of the other interviews in here…Thy Infernal, Mortiis, Bolt Thrower, Sodom, Gwar, Borknagar…it was more of the same. The CD reviews and the other articles are like that as well. There’s also some movie reviews and, come on, anybody who does a write up on “Plan 9 From Outer Space” has gotta be cool. Bottom line…I’ve seen a lot of different underground zines over the past few years and this was, without a doubt, one of the better ones that I’ve had the pleasure of reading. http://www.mandragora.ws