Rolling Stone features non-music articles that can transcend the rock mag genre, Uncut and Mojo contain wonderful artist retrospectives and stylish reviews, but for sheer usefulness it’s hard to go past Q magazine. The other magazines’ review sections are shorter (Rolling Stones in particular), so any given month’s music offerings can be barren. Q, on the other hand, makes a fetish of pages and pages of reviews, each short and marvellously pithy, with star ratings and capsule phrases that I’ve found mightily apt. The June issue of Q, for example, yields the following purchase possibilities (subject to more research), some of which did not pop up anywhere else:
- Steve Forbert’s The Place and the Time
- Align the Planets by In Case of Fire
- Steve Earles’s Townes
- Four Winds by The Lightning Seeds
- Deaths and Entrances by My Latest Novel