Son of Spamm!

Vol. 3, #10 (PO Box 230699 Portland, OR 97281) $3
by Chaz Thorndike

This fifth anniversary issue is over 100 pages of rule-breaking and extreme coverage. Self-titled “The Globally Incorrect Interview & Review Mag,” Son of Spamm! (or SOS) covers the unholy ground of aggressive music, horror movies, and death-obsessed artists. In addition, there are ‘zine reviews, video reviews, top ten lists/overviews, and a wide variety of CD reviews broken down into sections (metal, alternative, misc., electronic, death, and rap/hip-hop). Once you get used to SOS‘s tendency to run a full-page, graphically-beautiful title page on the right, with the article starting on the left, reviews that give you absolutely no idea of what the CD actually sounds like, not to mention more typos and layout 101 mistakes than you’d expect from a magazine which takes six months to create an issue, you grow to like Son of Spamm!. Of course those criticisms are petty, but they do restrict the total enjoyment of a fine ‘zine. On the positive side (not that either Editor Rod Black or I really have one), SOS is doing a lot of things right: great fonts, beautiful title pages, interesting drop quotes and smaller images to really draw you into an article, good-looking ads for cool stuff, and coverage on a wide variety of topics within the extreme world. In other words, the temporary drawbacks are a small inconvenience for an increasingly good publication.