Violence! It fears the law which tries to contain it through punishment, it is the enemy of ethics and morality which relies on religions to keep consciences at bay, but can violence become an artistic language?
Haven't cinematography and visual art been nourished by violence, even if by decontextualizing it and exalting its purely aesthetic charm? For Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Gustav Metzger or Marina Abramović, violence was part of art itself, but not even music remained immune to the ambiguous charm of violence. Punk, noise, brutal death metal, speedcore are just some of the most extreme and violent forms of rock music, often victims of aesthetic exasperation but sometimes harbingers of authentic semantic revolutions, where the violent act becomes a cultural and political gesture.
The debut of Abigail Snail, a group made up of singer, guitarist and bassist Stef Kett and drummer Will Glaser (already known to our readers for the recent splendid album “Music Of The Terrazoku: Ethnographic Recordings From An Imagined Future”), is fueled by this impetus. The brilliant saxophonist James Allsopp (Sly And Family Drone) is responsible for completing the band responsible for “Rad Berms”.
There are albums that become difficult to explain without falling into quotations, this is not the case, Abigail Snail seem more interested in becoming a touchstone for future stylistic digressions. Otherwise the wild sequence of free jazz, harmonic moments entrusted to singing, guitar disturbances and incessant start And restart of the sublime “Soul Berm”: three minutes and forty-nine seconds that could be expanded beyond belief without ever losing its identity.
Rooted in tradition and genetically experimental, the English band's album seeks spaces to violate in the blues with the angry song of “Good Grief” and, with equal violence, deconstructs the more airy and ethereal page “Bages” to the point of changing its meditative essence into subtle terror.
There is even room for a song that in other hands could aspire to success, but the folk-psych with slight desert-blues traits of “Attach Bayonets” is listless and unhealthy enough to remain immune to fruition in streaming. If you fear being in the presence of a difficult work, you are off track: you can delight in the harmonic and melodic reverberations of the crystalline and almost pop “Stay Rad” or justify your passion for this crooked gem by sharing with your friends the bloodless blues of “Bitchin' Chords” or the intriguing imperfections of the improvisation that form the backdrop to “Show Breaking To Waves”.
That the charm of “Rad Berms” is the result of the different artistic backgrounds of the three members is evident, the cohesion of the elements, although linked to improvisation and sometimes sparse, is not only technically interesting, but also restless and biting enough to resist the risk of creative self-indulgence. Abgail Snail's debut is one of the most regenerating pages of the current year, one of the few albums destined for diligent and frequent future re-listenings, and these days that's no small thing.
07/18/2026
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
