Each Tuesday, FADER editor Matthew Schnipper highlights an underappreciated recent release he thinks we need to know about. This week it’s Bikini Kill’s Reject All American. Watch them play “I Hate Danger” here , buy Reject All American hereand read about it after the jump.

It’s peculiar that on the main page of the NY Times website this link is: “In Defense of Print Magazines” because when you click on it, the article says “Felix Burrichter’s Valentine to Magazines.” That’s an extreme lingual disconnect, morph from defense to love. Reading Burrichter’s brief post on “The Moment,” T Magazine’s style blog, there is no defense at all, just simple praise. Or maybe even less than praise, a light zeal from a slight obsessive. He gushes briefly about a few titles old and new that flutter his heart, talking of architecture magazines from the 30s and Playbills for plays he never saw. Though he is a designer speaking almost exclusively about the design of the magazines, I identify with his peculiar and specific loves. That nicheness is a push-pull in my relationship with magazines both personal and professional. Though surely it was not the first magazine I ever purchased, I remember going to the Barnes and Noble in Farmington, Connecticut and buying the Flipside with Red Aunts on the cover. It was ugly and green. In the back, there was a review of Teenage Jesus and the Jerks. It made their music sound like total sheet metal noise, scary abrasions and loud bombings. It was years and years after that until I heard Teenage Jesus, but this idea that such viciousness in music could even exist stayed with me. Kind of like that, the other day, I was talking about the back page of Vanity Fair magazine, which every issue is a different person answering the Proust questionnaire. My parents are longtime subscribers, and while growing up I would flip through the magazine, I almost never read anything else except that back page. I remember reading Matt Lauer’s answers, and him speaking about not having enough time with his grandparents before they died. I don’t know why I remember this so vividly, but I do. But if I want to sound cool, I’m gonna say it was because it was in a magazine.

I also remember that Reject All American reviewed in Punk Planet. Dan Sinker, the editor in chief, wrote about it and said that while it was not as good as any of their singles, it was more monumental, their only full length full album after years and years. This was weird to me, that he could be saying that something else was actually better in terms of quality, but that the less superior release was actually more significant. This was about thirteen years ago and I still remember it. Something about the heft of the print, I guess. But listening to it now, a lot of years later, in the context of many many other singles, I think he might be wrong. It’s a great album, for sure, but it’s so sure. When you listen to “I Hate Danger,” which is the b-side for the “I Hate Fucking,’ 7-inch, you can hear this shredding timidity that so much of the album lacks. But then again, that only sits on its own, Toby Vail, their drummer, singing “I stopped talking an hour ago,” her voice all shy ellipses until she bursts out the last verse “and if you don’t know, well, let’s just say you’re a lot, lot stupider than I thought.” But that’s just a song. Reject All American was able to take all of those fierce emotions of loss and power and anger and spread them out piecemeal song to song. So maybe Sinker was right, and the whole was bigger than the sum of its parts.

Or maybe, probably, he was just some fucking dude just like everyone else is some fucking dude but he just wrote it down and put it in a magazine that I read when it was pretty crucial for me to be learning about things and I still remember it. It’s weird to work at a magazine, I mean what do I know, you know? I guess sometimes a lot. That’s kind of cool.