Philadelphia — A former MAGNET editor returned to the world of print music journalism this month, publishing Undercover. The zine focuses on album covers, telling the tales behind well-known indie/post-punk album covers, together with Pleasure Division’s Unknown Pleasures, Wire’s Pink Flag, Slint’s Spiderland and extra from Pixies, the Feelies, Echo & The Bunnymen and Unsane.
Interviews with the albums’ designers and photographers had been carried out by Matthew Fritch (MAGNET intern class of ’97, no honors given). Accompanying the interviews, seven visible artists created unique variations of the album sleeves—covers of covers, if you’ll—taking inspiration from the supply materials.
Vital reception of Undercover has been lukewarm, with one Instagram remark calling it “some type of midlife disaster zine” and one other characterizing it as “a cry for assist.” A Passyunk Avenue record-store clerk who most popular to not be recognized stated it was “cool,” but it surely was considerably unclear whether or not she was referring to the zine or the brand new Tame Impala tune that had simply begun taking part in within the store. A significant endorsement of Undercover got here from MAGNET editor/writer Eric T. Miller.
“I learn most of it,” stated Miller. “There’s a typo on web page 13.”
The unique art work featured within the zine is a spotlight, starting from work and pictures to a model of Pixies’ Surfer Rosa album cowl created with genetically modified yeast incubated and painted in a petri dish. Fritch padded the remainder of the zine with juvenile makes an attempt at humor and cringeworthy references to obscure tune lyrics and different quasi-countercultural tropes.
Appropriately, Undercover is offered free of charge at some Philadelphia-area file shops, together with Repo, Latchkey, Lengthy In The Tooth, Philadelphia Document Trade, Important Road Music and Creep Information. U.S. file shops occupied with giving the zine away can e mail mattjfritch@gmail.com, and he’ll most likely ship you 10 copies.
Requested whether or not a second quantity of an newbie, outdated medium chronicling Twentieth-century post-punk music and its accompanying design aesthetic will probably be coming, Fritch replied, “No one has requested me that query earlier than.”
