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With Midwinter Swimmers, The Innocence Mission continue the trend of creating albums of sparkling clarity and coherent vision. The quality is always unfalteringly high throughout, and the tonal and thematic shifts provide enough progression to make every new album essential. This is no exception.
The long career of The Innocence Mission has been characterised by a remarkable consistency decorated with subtle shifts of tone and mood. While one album might nod to 60s folk-pop, another will recall dream-pop revivalists Beach House or the deconstructed avant-folk minimalism of Tori and Reiko Kudo. But at the centre of it all is the partnership between Karen and Don Peris, the married couple who, along with old school friend Mike Bitts on bass, have been the beating heart of the band since its formation in 1986.
Karen Peris has drawn from a seemingly inexhaustible wellspring of songs for nearly forty years: songs which shimmer delicately even when enveloped in the thick, immersive shrouds of dream pop that Don’s guitars often conjure up. Midwinter Swimmers opens with a track, This Thread Is a Green Street, which seems to roll up all of their influences in one three-minute ball. The distinctive Galaxie 500-esque guitar sound, the Mazzy Star-like textures, The Mamas & the Papas tambourine, and especially Karen’s voice, high and delicate and persuasive, always threatening to lose itself in the mix and always reappearing intact.
As always, the lyrics vacillate between the cryptic and the beautifully plain-spoken, and the melody seems to ripple out from a still centre. All Innocence Mission songs seem to have their own intangible, irresistible force of gravity, a gravity born in a dream state and slightly foreign to the physical world. The title track proceeds on a cool rustle of acoustic guitar and crisp but slightly detached tambourines. Occasionally, the music drops out entirely, and we are left with Karen’s voice: at these points, the song crystallises around a point of sadness or yearning or loss, sudden moments of sharp relief amid the hazy shades of winter.
Sometimes, these songs feel like photomontages made up of snapshots of mundane or stark images which, when assembled, create something of beauty or importance. An appeal to visual language, particularly the language of photography, is an important part of Karen’s songwriting. The Camera Divides the Coast of Maine, augmented by a surprising sweep of strings, is a song that feels almost as if it has been partially converted from sound to light. Here, Karen Peris explores the link between time, memory and place in her own deeply idiosyncratic and genuinely poetic way. She is adept at off-kilter miniatures in the mode of Sibylle Baier: a song like John Williams does an awful lot with the most minimal of ingredients, and the soft patterns of electric guitar provide a perfect frame for Karen’s soft brushstrokes.
A soft, oneiric take on 60s West Coast psych-folk makes its way into parts of the album: the zephyr-like Your Saturday Picture and the beautifully languid Orange of the Westering Sun. The latter is a homage of sorts to Joni Mitchell: the groups stayed in Mitchell’s home in California when Mitchell’s then-husband, Larry Klein, was recording the first two Innocence Mission albums. Cloud To Cloud, with its wandering upright bass, nods to a later, jazzier Mitchell.
Karen is an aficionado of the mundane, a flaneuse finding heightened meaning in small occurrences, in the anticipation of meeting, in sparse landscapes whether rural or urban. The autumnal We Would Meet in Center City uses graceful piano and a flourish of vocal harmony to capture a fleeting, nostalgic feeling. It’s similar in some ways to Yann Tiersen’s soundtrack work. Ultimately, the lyrics are meditative and hopeful, and seem to have as much to do with eastern philosophy as with western songwriting convention. The zen-like stillness is mysterious in origin, but it pervades every song. It is most noticeable, perhaps, on Sisters and Brothers, with its gentle repetitions and message of gratitude. But as still and sedate as Karen Peris’ poetry maybe, it is not without surprising detail or surreal occurrence. The closing song, A Different Day, begins with a startling image: ‘though some days I have not left my room, my clothes ahead of me walk.’ Here she talks about the impossibility of experiencing time as it actually happens, and the paradoxical need to live in the moment, ‘since here and now is strange to me, and even now is changing into still a different day.’ She seems to advocate for cherishing time without being beholden to it.
It’s a lesson The Innocence Mission have lived by. They have certainly made the most of their time, creating thirteen albums of sparkling clarity and coherent vision since their 1989 debut, and they show no sign of slowing up. Picking a favourite Innocence Mission album is something of a fool’s errand, given the way in which all of their music seems of a piece with itself, a continuation on the same theme. The quality has remained unfalteringly high throughout, which is something that can’t be said for many bands with upwards of a dozen albums, and the tonal and thematic shifts provide enough progression to make every new album essential. If you are new to the band, you have a huge journey of discovery ahead of you, and Midwinter Swimmers is as good a place as any to dive in.
Midwinter Swimmers (29th November 2024) Bella Union
Bandcamp: https://theinnocencemission.bandcamp.com/album/midwinter-swimmers
