This song here’s the third and final one songwriter Rory Atwell conjured up to be included on For Screening Purposes Only, the only album made by dance-punk trio Test Icicles. As time goes on, there’s more chance of their name being forgotten. But it’s posts like mine that I hope will be found years from now for people to check them out. Short story from my POV, I didn’t think much of them when they around and I was younger. Then a few years passed, I rediscovered the album and found it was actually pretty good. ‘Snowball’ marks the start of a run in the LP that I consider to be solid, solid tunes.

I look at Spotify and, even though it’s not representative of all music listeners worldwide, I can’t look past that ‘Snowball’ is one of the least played songs on the album – only getting more plays than the interlude, closer ‘Party on Dudes’ and ‘What’s Michelle Like?’, which on original copies of the CD was a hidden track. I guess the song does take a while to get started. Atwell adopts an exaggerated vocal at points to sing his lyrics. Kinda like a bird squawking. It’s a thing he does in all his penned songs, but I’ve come to think of it as him portraying some sort of persona. And speaking of the lyrics, they’re not so much about anything but they conjure some good imagery. But it’s all of those reasons, plus the riffs and general energy that have always attracted me towards it.

I think it’s only taken me until writing this post to get to grips with the timing of the drum pattern and guitar that makes up the song’s introduction. The way those drums are played have never correlated with my sense of timing for the longest time. It does literally start on the first beat of the bar though, so as long as you count starting with ‘1’, then you’re good to go. The whole “band” drop in after a bit – band in quotes because the rhythm section is a processed one – and it’s then Atwell goes on to sing about a string of various situations and scenes, from a dog looking for a bone and a son of the East who can’t kill the Witch to the eventual snowball the song’s named after and a hurdy-gurdy that Atwell implores band member Sam Mehran to play before then telling him to turn it off in the choruses. It’s a strange song. I like it a lot.