Snow Palms – Intervals

With his work in the London instrumental trio State River Widening from the late '90s to the mid '00s, David Sheppard helped to create a pastoral, folk-inflected strain of post-rock that stood apart from the mechanistic, cerebral approach of his contemporaries. Snow Palms, Sheppard’s latest project, bears similarities with his previous work in its minimalist approach to composition, which layers repeating melodies and countermelodies to create a shimmering, hypnotic mass of sound.
 
On Intervals, however, he eschews the folk and rock instrumentation deployed on earlier projects to focus on mallet instruments, including xylophones, glockenspiels, vibraphones and metallophones. Coupled with the record’s simple, bold structures – these pieces are not so much songs, as brief snapshots of crystalline beauty – this proves to be a rich instrumental palette for Sheppard’s vision. Intervals demonstrates that, in the right hands, post-rock can possess warmth and simplicity without compromising its innovative drive. [Sam Wiseman]