My favourite magazine – Cabinet

Music magazines are starting to annoy me. I have been a subscriber to The Wire since the mid 90s, I get Wax Poetics as well. Both offer a transitory read and are good for a few short trips to work and back and then they head off to the great pile in the corner. For all the good writing and laudable intentions they are quite insular and inward looking – Wax Poetics’ best articles have been when they have stepped out of their crate digger land, and The Wire is very dependent on their interview subjects.

Res Magazine arrives every so often and lasts one train journey – its hyper-short attention span articles are like advertisements and it will be very interesting to see what their ‘new hybrid’ magazine is going to be like. Their subscriber-only DVDs were a nice touch until Youtube arrived and basically filled the niche for interesting music videos, albeit at a much lower resolution. The digital shorts niche is more than adequately filled with great blogs like No Fat Clips.

But, just over a week ago I subscribed to Cabinet Magazine. I had been recommended it by a trusted source and thought it was worth a shot – hell, their website sounded interesting enough on its own. I added a couple of back issues to tide me over until the next issue arrives.

The back issues arrived on Friday and, well, it is an excellent read. The writing is fantastic, witty, quirky, and intelligent. Each issue is ‘themed’ and the contributors write broadly around the theme, plus a few regular bits – including a lovely piece on a colour each issue. The layout is neat and tidy with plenty of full page, full colour plates, plus some bookmark style card inserts, sometimes a CD, othertimes a poster or another treat.

It really is quite excellent. I’d highly recommend Cabinet.