Devil's Noise (1st number, June 2016)

Title: Devil's Noise
Genre: Fanzine
Year: June 2016
Pages: 80
Rating: 74/100


















Let's open the "books/fanzine" section with Devil's Noise, an excellent Italian fanzine whose first (and only, for the moment) number was released in June 2016. After one year, I am still waiting for its second number, very anticipated since the guys behind this zine (one of them is the singer/guitarist of the known Italian doomsters Black Oath, a band that I saw live one year ago at Sinister Noise Rock Club in Rome) announced it in February 2017 on the Devil's Noise FB page. But unfortunately, this page is no longer updated since that announce, so I hope that this silence represent the classic "calm before the storm".


I am saying all this because Devil's Noise, written completely in Italian, deserve really a lot. It is presented as a very professional 'zine due to its coloured graphics, so I think it would be perfect to be selled in a paper shop. In addition, it is admittely inspired by Grind Zone, an historic Italian magazine released between 1994 and 2013 and dedicated, just as in the case of Devil's Noise, to the entire extreme metal world so to range from the doom metal to the bestial black/death metal à la Blasphemy. The main force of point of Devil's Noise, in my opinion, is given by the interviews and there is need to say that the guys made a very good start interviewing relevant bands such as My Dying Bride, Varathron or Mortuary Drape. Instead, unlike many other chaotic and primitive fanzines where there is a monstrous bunch of reviews, these ones are relatively and rightly few and also ordered especially in the last pages of this number, even through an alphabetical order. Finally, you will find a special article about the 4th edition of the Navajo Calling, an Italian Festival took place in 19th/20th August 2016 near Parma (Emilia-Romagna), offering, in this case, a series of (sometimes too!) short interviews.

But into the aforementioned special you will find certain interviews of which only the answers given by the bands have been published while there are no traces of the questions of the interviewer, so you have to intuit them but, said frankly, this has no sense. So, I recommend to these guys to fix better the various articles because, for example, the typing errors are enough frequent while bands like the Italian death/grinders Haemophagus are wrongly taken for defunct and also reincarnated into the death metal band Gravesite (check out their fantastic sophomore album "Neverending Trail of Skulls"!) but all this isn't true!

Said all this, Devil's Noise is, surely, a very worthy initiative, also because, after the death of the fundamental Grind Zone, there was nothing similar, despite the many efforts of good Italian bands, labels and festival devoted to the extreme metal. But, now, there is need to resolve this question: when will be released the second number? We'll let the historians judge...

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