New Music From the innocence mission
The first studio album from the innocence mission in four years, Midwinter Swimmers (due November 29, 2024) sounds immediately like an old friend. At the same time, it’s a new kind of adventure for the beloved Pennsylvania band of high school friends Karen Peris, Don Peris, and Mike Bitts, having both an expansive, cinematic quality and the strange, lo-fi beauty of a newly discovered vintage folk/pop album, brimming with melody. An attentiveness to small detail typifies the way the innocence mission’s songs look closely at everyday moments as miraculous worlds of their own. Karen Peris’s words are poetry, with a particular sense of place and color, of the visual, that communicate universal experiences of change and loss, and of love, hope, and gratitude.
Lead single and album-opening song “This Thread Is a Green Street” is a perfect entrance into the innocence mission’s sound and sensibility. Karen Peris describes it as “a sort of envisioning the landscape as a world of doorways, that might allow us to locate memory or to be nearer in some way to people we miss.” Piano melodies and high electric with strummed nylon string guitars make a glimmery soundtrack for “Midwinter Swimmers,” a happy-sad song of hopefulness about seeing an absent loved one soon. Something of this feeling is echoed in the recording, made with a spontaneity and a sense of trying to capture a single moment and hold it up to the light. In one verse of closing song “A Different Day,” Karen relates a favorite sycamore tree to an imaginary appaloosa horse that she might ride to visit a friend, underlining her hope that she could be made into a stronger, more courageous person who is without anxiety. This same hope of personal transformation is present in “Orange of the Westering Sun,” which recalls being in California at Joni Mitchell’s home studio to record the innocence mission’s first two albums. On the opposite US coast, a favorite place in Cape Elizabeth is the setting of the dynamic and ambient “The Camera Divides the Coast of Maine.” Here, and throughout the album, there is a palpable emotion inherent in Karen’s voice, and in the distinctive combination of Don’s luminous, high electric guitar lines with Karen’s low (baritone and nylon string), rhythmic guitar and piano playing. Their longtime friend Mike Bitts adds a further dimension of upright and electric bass. “There is a companionship about Karen’s voice,” Don Peris says, “and a realistic joy and gratitude, in the midst of life’s difficulties, that she is expressing here on songs like ‘Sisters and Brothers.’ I feel bolstered and comforted by them.”
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Recommended Tracks: Track 1, “This Thread Is A Green Street,” Track 2, “Midwinter Swimmers,” Track 3, “The Camera That Divides The Coast of Maine,” Track 9, “Sisters and Brothers,” Track 10, “Orange Of The Westering Sun,” Track 11, “A Different Day”
Label: Thérèse Records / Bella Union / P-Vine
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