Ignorance Is Strength Fanzine (Review)

This is the first issue of this new printed zine (A4), done by Wouter from the Netherlands. As far as I've read in the introduction it's not the first fanzine he's doing, and you can definetly see that. A few general things about it: All the questions to every single band are really good, well prepared and you realize that Wouter put a lot of thought in them. Now one could say, well, that's what someone who's doing a zine is expected to do, and that's probably right, but it's surely not happening in most interviews you'll read in hardcore fanzines, or on websites about that topic. Very often it's all like "what do you think about Have Heart, what shoes do you wear, when will your new record be released blablabla". But I'm getting off topic. Like I said, the questions are good, it's not your standardized small talk bullshit, and on the other hand Wouter's not trying to talk about issues that are too far off the track, something that sucks most of the time as well. Another thing he did very well is the artwork. It's all cut and paste, but good structured and in a great layout, so it's easy to read and looks cool, and that just how it should be.
To the content, basically you'll get two kinds of: interviews and some kind of columns in which various people write about certain song lyrics that have a special meaning to them, which is a great idea since most people tend to write so much boring bullshit in columns if they get to write about whatever they want. But first about the interviews, you'll get: Black Breath, Blind To Faith, Cold Snap, Cornered, Feed, Foundation, Goldust, Keep It Clear, Mindset, New Lows, Oathbreaker and Vivian Girls. The ones I enjoyed the most were Black Breath, Cold Snap, Cornered and the one with my own band haha, just because it's so cool to have interview over more than one page in a zine like this. I'm not really into the Youth Crew type of bands, it's just not my cup of tea. But to be fair, without bands like these and people who support them there would be even less printed zines, so that's totally fine. While reading the interviews with Blind To Faith and Vivian Girls I kinda asked myself what's the point about agreeing in doing an interview if every answer is shorter than the question, I mean, if I don't want to say anything why am I doing an interview? Quite strange, but ok. As much as I like Blind To Faith's music, all they say is that Hardcore sucks and Gehenna and Iron Monkey are cool. I mean, although they might be right at some terms, it seems to be quite a lot of "we know bands way too underground for you". Ah whatever, it's not that I'm never doing this.
When it comes to the columns, I have to give special prominence to two of them: the one of Aram, where he talks about 108's "Killer of the soul". To be honest, I didn't know the lyrics until now, but the aggressivness and words really gave me goosebumbs, I think they are some of the best pro-vegetarian/vegan lyrics I've ever read. "Killer of the animal, only a demon could dine on the flesh of the dead". That's so hard. Awesome. And how Aram writes about how this song touched him, although he was vegetarian for a few years when discovering the lyrics, is great, because I kinda felt the same now.
The second column is by Arne, who's doing arguably Germany's best zine: the Dawk Fanzine. The song he choose is Supertramp's "It's raining again". It's not that I can connect to his thoughts and feelings about this song as good as with Aram's, but I simply love his writing. If he'd write a book, I'd buy it.
Besides those two there are some people writing about Youth Of Today (pretty generic stuff if you ask me), Cap'n Jazz, Modern Life Is War and what not. Good mixture of people and bands and lyrics. I like stuff like that, because it always makes me think about what song I would have choosen to write about and why and what I'd say about it.
So what can I say? If you're hungry for a good fanzine (completely in English btw.) better get a copy of this one by dropping Wouter a line at ignoranceisstrengthzine@gmail.com.