There is a great sense of detail in The Innocence Mission’s latest album, ‘Midwinter Swimmers’. It is apparent in lyrics that have a poetic precision and colourfully capture place. The music is imbued with a fragility reminiscent of Vashti Bunyan and mingles lo-fi charm with subtle shifts to create a cinematic palette. It is a minor key delight from the Pennsylvania trio consisting of childhood friends Karen Peris, Don Peris and Mike Bitts in which they achieve their aim of locating the half-remembered beauty of sing-alongs in their 1970s childhoods. The record aches with memory and is seeped with the miraculous nature of everyday events and objects.
Opener ‘This Thread is a Green Street’ sets the mood. Gently strummed guitar and Karen Peris’s introspective voice with its distinctive phrasing draw the listener in. Then in the song’s final minute, there is a magical moment where the veil is lifted, piano comes in while the guitar and vocals soar, though not in a histrionic way. It is a much more understated change but it creates a spine-tingling effect.
Her lyricism is displayed perfectly on the title track’s opening lines, “The midwinter swimmers are like stars / or like some dots of light, through tears”, its reference to them being “beautiful, sad at the same time” is an apt description of the song. Its heartbreaking lines (“saving up all these things to tell you / and things to ask, because you / are not here at this time”) has a real economy in conveying that feeling of separated obsession where a person remains central to your thoughts. Musically, the shifts, pauses and changes built around nylon guitar, tambourine, piano and mellotron are emotionally charged.
There is nothing apart from the title to suggest that ‘John Williams’ is a homage to the film composer best known for the ‘Star Wars’ theme and is the polar opposite of the bombast associated with that franchise. ‘We Would Meet in Center City’ is built around a rolling piano line and has Karen’s voice hitting its highest register to deeply involving effect.
The bossa nova guitar of ‘Your Saturday Picture’ creates a compelling mood. Although it is another song about missing a person, there is some reassuring imagery with the trees arching their protective arms and the streetlights blinking to cross, imbuing them with human qualities. The lovers are reunited on ‘Cloud to Cloud’ which begins with a wandering guitar line before opening out with some dignified orchestration. There are some potently poetic images as they carry guitars, groceries and flowers and the giddy euphoria is pinpointed with the lines, “we sail between the buildings / we sail between the aisles / we swim between the column of words.”
‘A Hundred Flowers’ is more downbeat, reflecting on how life does not always happen as planned and unintentionally letting down a romantic partner. Karen’s voice and melodies are especially gorgeous on this song. ‘Sisters and Brothers’ also has a bossa nova feel and is quietly colourful, enumerating the yellows, greens and oranges singing, the red lake, the blue of the day, and how the branches, buildings, mourning doves, leaves and grasses all sing on. It is an example of how a song does not require volume to be vivid and alive.
That sense of colour is maintained with ‘Orange of the Westering Sky’, a song that conveys gratitude and fear as well as having a strong feeling for place. It recalls being in California to record the first two Innocence Mission albums and specifically at Joni Mitchell’s house. In a sign of precocious musical taste, at five (an age when many have only just graduated from ‘The Wheels on the Bus’) Karen’s favourite song was Mitchell’s ‘Both Sides Now’. In a fulfilment of childhood dreams, she has gone on to sing on Mitchell’s ‘Night Ride Home’. By the time of the final track, ‘A Different Day’, it has become apparent that even though the pacing has been subdued the album has been full of melodic richness and variety. The song is full of yearning, optimism and goodness (“And if I walked faster / I would fly right off the ground / I would race all the blocks of town / to you.”)
‘Midwinter Swimmers’ is an intimate gem. There is a misleading sense that everything is teetering on the brink of collapse but clearly there are no wasted notes and all the subtle shifts in mood and instrumentation are immaculate. Karen’s voice is distinctive and has an emotive fragility. It is a record that benefits from a lyric sheet as her enunciation is not the sharpest but the thoughts are profound and she has a rare facility with language.
The Innocence Mission: Midwinter Swimmers – Out 29 November 2024 (Bella Union)
swimmers – the innocence mission
I was editor of the long-running fanzine, Plane Truth, and have subsequently written for a number of publications. While the zine was known for championing the most angular independent sounds, performing in recent years with a community samba percussion band helped to broaden my tastes so that in 2021 I am far more likely to be celebrating an eclectic mix of sounds and enthusing about Made Kuti, Anthony Joseph, Little Simz and the Soul Jazz Cuban compilations as well as Pom Poko and Richard Dawson.
