Blog of the Week: Suburban Voice and Sonic Overload
By now you should be familiar with Boston legend and monthly Maximum Rocknroll columnist Al Quint. The publisher of the long-running Boston fanzine Suburban Voice didn’t let the “death” of print media stop him. The paper version ended with issue #46 in 2003, but he’s since moved the zine to the web, where it lives on in blog form. The site is mainly focused on reviews, just like it has since Al’s very first outing in 1982: Suburban Punk (download issue #1 here!). He’s got a fairly wide range of musical tastes, so you get everything from rock and metal to classic punk, new hardcore and some poppier stuff, as well as the occasional personal aside. This is one of the best resources for record and demo reviews anywhere, and quite an undertaking for just one dude.
Al’s undying love of music is best appreciated on his weekly online radio show Sonic Overload. The show started out back in 2000 as a real-live radio show called Inflammable Material on Allston-Brighton Free Radio. Again, Al didn’t let the demise of this outlet stop him from doing what he loved. Here, you can download two hours (!) of music every week, and it’s a consistently great show. The shows are archived on this blog site, but as yet it’s not available in podcast form. But I guess that’s looking a gift horse in the mouth, and Sonic Overload is one mighty gifty horse.
If you’re interested in checking out some issues of Suburban Voice fanzine from over the years, just hop on over to our friends at Operation Phoenix Records, where you can download this and loads of other classic zines of yore.
