The Innocence Mission have been around so long that they know what it’s like to both capture and practically fall out of the cultural consciousness. When the original four members met back in the early 1980s, during their Catholic high school’s production of Godspell, they couldn’t deny their congruities: warm, easygoing, soft-spoken students with a knack for folk-rock and dream pop. Fast forward a few years and the Innocence Mission was born: primary singer-songwriter Karen Peris and guitarist Don Peris got married, their debut album came out on A&M in 1989, and comparisons to Kate Bush and the Sundays earned them a cult following. Depending on how old you are, you might know the Innocence Mission from their interviews on MTV’s 120 Minutes, appearances on Late Night With David Letterman and the Empire Records soundtrack, or Sufjan Stevens’ breathtaking rooftop cover of “The Lakes of Canada.” Now long out of the spotlight but with a sound that’s largely unchanged, the husband-and-wife duo and original bassist Mike Bitts are approaching the end of middle age on Midwinter Swimmers, their 13th album, with even more unbarred earnestness, a sharp contrast to the jaded stances permeating modern life.
Now nearly 40 years into her recording career, Karen Peris’ voice remains as delicate and angelic as when she was a teenager—and still unmistakably her own. Close your eyes and it's the voice Matilda imagined Miss Honey having: delicate, sprightly, encouraging; her chirp fit for innocent conversations between book stacks (an Innocence Mission dreamscape lucky Borders shoppers once stumbled across). That weightlessness turns the album’s title track into a curious and soothing tale of longing, and “Your Saturday Picture” into an evocative tale of yearning with childlike insouciance. Occasionally she crunches a word in her mouth like Björk, wide and mawkish, like each “sing on” uttered in “Sisters and Brothers.” Even when sadness seeps into her heart seconds later (“I lost something I used to be before/I don’t know why I’m crying”), Peris finds equanimity in the way tree branches and birds carry on in troubled weather. While her husband plucks and strums various guitars to add texture, Peris’ sweet voice summons cottagecore imagery naturally: leafy rhubarb, Appaloosa horses, leaves falling onto her head like a crown. It’s no wonder she was once invited to sing on Joni Mitchell’s Night Ride Home.
With age, Peris’ stories have grown more personal and straightforward, though not without their usual charm. Midwinter Swimmers is an album born from observations on her daily walks and pangs of longing during time apart from her husband. She cultivates a grand vision of romance in a song about their alternate dream life on the coast of Maine, living alongside sunlit moss and a picturesque striped lighthouse. But it’s the little asides dotting each track that showcase her affection best: “Saving up all these things to tell you,” ”Wait for me/I miss all the buses lately,” “I would race all the blocks of town to you.” Karen and Don Peris structure these songs to burst with love in the glow of ’60s folk pop, and the rush of those highs—the back half of “This Thread Is a Green Street” cascades with lavish harmonies and a surprise rhythm-section reveal—draws a straight line through the influences from their childhoods: the Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, James Taylor. “In five o’ clock raindrops/You stop to take a picture/Of you and me,” she sings in “Cloud to Cloud.” “We’re carrying guitars, groceries, and flowers/Everything is light.” Illustrating the tender moment in full color, Don leans heavier into his drumkit and electric guitar while Karen answers with melodica, a playful back-and-forth of musical PDA.
Much like the way Sufjan Stevens’ most prevailing love songs double as hymns, the Innocence Mission have consistently turned to Catholicism to better understand the world and their place within it. “Oh I’m grateful for you/And oh I am afraid/of many things I should not fear if I believe,” Peris sings on “Orange of the Westering Sun.” Over plodding piano in “We Would Meet in Center City,” she coos, “Are you with me? Can you come? Can you reach me when you want, on any wave?” It’s an emotionally walloping chorus, and she answers those questions with a wordless, goosebump-inducing vocal refrain that, appropriately, feels like being brushed by a ghost. Midwinter Swimmers doles out discreet edification; Peris is no preacher or proselytizer. She’s instead like a solicitous follower who does her part by keeping the sacristy tidy or straightening bibles in hymnal racks: creating a welcoming space for those seeking comfort.
So when Peris sings, “Love is the song, the song, the song,” it doesn’t matter whose love she’s talking about. She knows it when she feels it, and every musical touch—that spiraling nylon-string guitar melody, the soft wheezing of a pump organ, cymbal taps as gentle as batted eyelashes—makes you feel it, too. The malleability of subjects in the Innocence Mission’s songs allows you to slip into Peris’ words, feel the crevices in her emotions, and accept her calming reassurances. From the retro mellotron to the band’s steadfast use of tambourines with a cold echo, Midwinter Swimmers sounds like a forgotten folk album from the ’60s or ’70s—a Vashti Bunyan and Paul Simon collaboration, if their personalities weren’t total contradictions—with all the hope, promise, and desire records of that era tend to hold.
Some words are used so often that their meaning weakens. So describing Midwinter Swimmers with a word like “beautiful”—a quintessential victim of that tendency—may seem foolish. But listen to that sighing melody at the heart of “Your Saturday Picture,” those late-blooming piano chords that peak through a frosted window pane in “Orange of the Westering Sun,” how humbly the Innocence Mission capture it all: to wrap up the album in overwrought language would misunderstand the magic of the Innocence Mission. Consider Midwinter Swimmers, then, an invitation to reclaim the assured and commonplace language of awe. This is what “beautiful” was meant to describe.
