‘Soul Berm’, a track from Red Berms, Abigail Snail’s debut album, sounds like three instrumentalists operating in completely different genres. There’s guest reed player James Allsopp, who’s layering messy, Albert Ayler-style skronk. Will Glaser, the band’s drummer, is rattling at his ride tentatively, wading his way around the kit. And, when guitarist Stef Kett isn’t clawing at his guitar, he’s belting out mix-clipping garage rock vocals.
Suddenly, Glaser finds a pulse. Allsopp melds his noise into an ostinato – as does Allsopp. Strapped into the experimental jam equivalent of Desert Bus, the trio veer off the road into a propulsive, dusty groove, rhythms flying like shrapnel.
While not always expressed as thunderingly, it’s spur-of-the-moment synergy like this that defines Abigail Snail. The group is composed of Kett and Glasner, who had both been firmly active in the UK’s experimental scenes – Kett a part of Shield Your Eyes and Reciprocate, Glaser a member of several groups, including Sly & The Family Drone and World Sanguine Report. Allsopp – a decades-experienced reed player, who’d worked with everyone from Jorja Smith to David Axelrod – was later invited for the album and its live shows.
This collective proximity to weird British music not only allows for experimentation but allows experimentation to be expressed with fluidity and even-handedness. Like ‘Soul Berm’, ‘Good Grief’ sees each band member play with freedom and consideration towards space; drums, vocals, guitar and saxophone decentering themselves when necessary, before moving into raucous chordal stabs. On the next track, ‘Bages’, Abigail Snail retreat into soundscape and textured vocals.
Avant-rock can often be quite hideous, but this facility attempts to counteract the genre’s reputation as widely inaccessible. There’s a breadth of styles available – take the folky ‘Attach Bayonets’, the slacker pop-y ‘Stay Rad’, or the nearly-emo ‘Bitchin’ Chords’ – but the album works because experimentalism is coupled with Rock ‘n’ Roll Sensibilities™. Songs are radio-friendly in length, live-show friendly in their structure with jumps in intensity. Even the band’s writing process, which is based on keeping rehearsals to a minimum to keep good gig nerves and fresh improvisation intact, is arguably just as punky as it is fancy.
Clear attention is also paid to the sonic potentials of each member’s instruments, all three equally idiosyncratic musicians. Kett’s gnawing guitar shifts from pitch bending noise to devious acoustic work, notable for spindly alternate tunings. The latter style, best demonstrated on ‘Attach Bayonets’, is where he feels most interesting. On ‘Space Berm’, Glaser’s drumming is pushed to its extreme. And Allsopp’s unmoored noise makes for an exciting clash against the instrumental ranges of the guitar.
Rad Berms is worth it for Abigail Snail’s complete surrender to creative impulse, and for the ways in which their album pushes the boundaries of creative process. The group is still nascent, but as they involve more instrumentalists, Glaser, Kett, and hopefully Allsopp too, will morph into another strange and esoteric project under the same moniker. Just give them a room, some mics – and very little time to rehearse.
