Innocence Mission - A domestic liturgy

I've always had the feeling that writing music was like joining a conversation with other people.

(Karen Peris)

An eternal, moving dance step, that of Innocence Mission: the gentle rustle of an everyday, domestic idyll, beauty expressed and internalized through contemplation of one's lifelong companion, pain tempered by a serene acceptance of the inevitable, by a faith never flaunted in something greater. The music of Karen and Don Peris is one of those human works for which one can never be grateful enough: an unconditional gift to life, the gift of someone who couldn't take a step without letting its meaning be appreciated, by themselves and by others.

Across this Pennsylvania band's long career lies the strength not just of beauty, of the tangible poetry of the natural world, but above all of someone able to draw an interpretation from it, to trace lines between signs and events, composing hymns to this wondrous design. Reading Karen Peris's lyrics - who, after more than twenty years, still has the candor of when she timidly wrote songs on a guitar she'd just been given, hence the success of her "mission" - God's name appears only incidentally. The songwriter's Christianity seeps surreptitiously from the beating heart of her words, of her music: an inner map of the world on which to trace routes; an infinite palette with which to paint the world.

Something is fulfilled in the gentle rising of Karen's voice and Don's guitar: a hope, borne witness to through their own example, through the gift of their art to others and to an Other.

Chasing the light

The story of Innocence Mission begins in the mid-1970s in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in the bedroom of young Karen McCullogh. Fascinated by music since childhood, Karen spends her days venting her shyness through a few simple guitar chords and a voice that seem to serve as her only door onto the world. It will take a few more years before that same world grants her the most important encounter of her life: enrolled at Lancaster Catholic High School, Karen meets guitarist Don Peris, her future husband and exact other half of an artistic, romantic and spiritual union that will form the core of the Innocence Mission project.

With the help of bassist Mike Bitts and drummer Steve Brown, the two decide to form a band to accompany a school production of the musical "Godspell" and, after briefly splitting up in the mid-80s, reunite to give birth to their first EP, "Tending The Rose Garden". The record in question has the good fortune of passing through the hands of Joni Mitchell, who, captivated by the band's compositional freshness and Karen's delicate lyricism, decides to entrust the quartet to her producer and husband Larry Klein for the recording of a full-length album.

With their self-titled full-length debut (1989), however, the band's style is still far from defining itself with a personal identity. "Innocence Mission" is in fact a record that shines all too brightly with reflected light: the ghosts of bands like 10000 Maniacs and Prefab Sprout are far more than mere influences, and Larry Klein's polished, glossy production only pushes the band's musical coordinates toward an anonymous end-of-decade easy listening, making the sound excessively derivative.

What suffers most here is the songwriting, often left to founder amid bombastic synths and muffled guitars that cancel out its magic. The breezy opening single “Black Sheep Wall” glides along danceable and harmless, with sounds and arrangement simply geared toward highlighting the radio appeal of the vocal line; the situation doesn't change as we move deeper into the heart of the record: “Surreal” is a well-constructed, ethereal ballad, over whose delicate interplay of bass and acoustic guitar Karen Peris's voice radiates its angelic communicative power, but here too there's a lack of a sonic identity strong enough to make the song memorable.

Where the band seems to move with ease (the folk-pop of “Curious”, the nocturnal ballads “Broken Cyrcle” and “Notebook”), Larry Klein's production tricks step in to dilute the atmosphere, dulling the freshness of the melodic ideas. Elsewhere it's the band itself that still shows excessive uncertainty about which path to take, breaking up here and there the intimate tone that pervades the record with reassuring radio-friendly rides that draw freely on early U2 (“I Remember Me”) or on the already-mentioned Prefab Sprout (“Mercy”).

Listening to their debut album, Innocence Mission come across as a band with a solid knack for writing pop melodies and a decent sense of how to showcase them, but their personality remains far too much in the shadows: the attempt to evoke an imagery that wavers between an earthly hope for eternal childhood (the album cover is a work by Eva Roos, a children's book illustrator) and an otherworldly one tied to an explicit Christian faith (the delicate voice-and-guitar outro “Medjugorje”, emblematic from its very title) is flattened out by homogenizing, faceless production choices. Unfortunately, even Karen Peris's pure, girlish voice ends up becoming part of an overly saccharine sonic apparatus, still far from the seductive limbo between dream and melancholy she would be able to conjure in years to come.

Catchy and radio-ready, Innocence Mission's debut album manages to reach No. 167 on the Billboard chart, but its commercial success is offset by critics turning up their noses at a formula they find excessively derivative. The band's response comes two years later with the release of “Umbrella” (1991), an album that, while still bearing the mark of Larry Klein's glossy production, lets a few surprising flashes of ambition shine through along the way. “Umbrella” is first and foremost appreciable for its refusal to chase a hit single at all costs, opting instead for a unified musical approach built almost entirely around dreamy, circular ballads that seem to draw on the success of bands like the Sundays.

Listening to the album in full, truth be told, proves rather tiring and monotonous, but while the band occasionally seems to lose its way on overly pretentious tracks like the electro-acoustic, Beatles-esque chant “Revolving Man” or the tedious, reverb-drenched dream-pop of “Now In This Hush”, its own poetic voice begins here and there to emerge in small, captivating flashes. The title track is an enchanting lullaby in which the production is finally stripped bare and Karen's voice is free to move over a handful of soft piano chords, while the sweet “Beginning The World” is carried by a driving rhythm shyly streaked with a vein of melancholy.

Don Peris's guitar and Hammond organ punctuate songwriting that is starting to reach a high level, one in which the line between lightness and fragility in Karen's voice grows ever thinner. The sparkling opener “And hiding away”, though still held back by sounds that don't quite do it justice, instead works to refine a lyrical thread Karen had begun two years earlier with the single “Wonder of birds”, concerning a romantic yearning for flight that will accompany the singer throughout her entire artistic path: the exquisite evocative power of lines like “I prize the cloudy, tearing sky / For the thoughts that flap and fly” is only the starting point of a delicate lyricism that will need four more years to be considered fully realized.

Everything’s different now

In a recent interview Karen Peris has essentially disowned the work she did recording the first two albums: “Even though it was a wonderful experience for all of us, I'm embarrassed by the songwriting and by the way I sang on those albums. I was young and I was simply worried about sounding like someone else. Listening back to them today, I barely recognize myself on those first two records.” However harsh, Peris's self-criticism is nonetheless an effective way of summing up a period in which both the band and she herself were still searching for a personal, recognizable formula.

The turning point for Innocence Mission comes precisely in the period right after the release of Umbrella, with the four musicians busy both opening on promotional tours for major names in American pop-rock such as Emmylou Harris and Natalie Merchant, and taking part in valuable collaborations — among them Don Peris's contribution to “From Strength To Strength”, the album by Bob Dylan's son-in-law Peter Himmelman — while his wife was called on to duet with roots-rocker John Hiatt on his 1990 album “Stolen Moments”.

Four years thus go by in which the Lancaster quartet, experience after experience, develops a new artistic awareness that leads to the release of their first essential work. For the recording sessions of what would become Glow, Larry Klein — the producer of the first two albums, blamed for distorting the band's sound — is quickly set aside and promptly replaced by Dennis Herring, who had already worked with Camper Van Beethoven. Preceded by the successful single “Bright as yellow” (which climbed to No. 33 on the Billboard chart), Glow comes out in June 1995 and finally reveals a cohesive collective, distinctive in its sound and backed by a dozen immaculate compositions polished by a careful production. Herring's work behind the mixing desk strips the band's sound of the suffocating reverb that had marked their first two records and catapults Innocence Mission into a more intimate dimension, one in which the dream-pop of their early days is balanced with surprising ease by exquisite folk arrangements.

The ideal bridge between these two worlds is Karen's voice, less intent on showing off her abilities and more focused on embracing the songs rather than attacking them. A voice that in a different musical formula might have slipped into anonymity instead becomes, here, the trademark of a pop sound that uses folk to deconstruct itself with a childlike lightness, without the result ever feeling overly alienating or pretentious. Karen Peris's candid, confiding voice lays out delicate images of domestic warmth on the opener “Keeping Awake”, marked by a sinuous arpeggio from Don Peris and evocative in the comforting spirituality of the refrain “I'm near to sleeping, I am keeping awake/ Hearing your voice in the house”. Then “Bright As Yellow” bursts in, a limping, electro-acoustic nursery rhyme with a melody ready to lodge itself in the listener's mind, minimal in its arrangement and marked by the coexistence of Karen's disenchanted delivery and the tremolo of Don Peris's Morricone-esque guitar, an unsettling, desert-like element that enriches the track without blunting its pop hook.

Don's ethereal guitar again takes center stage over an acoustic backdrop on “Brave”, a country song lively in its rhythm and at the same time as light as a run across a field in the faint light of sunset. The album's masterpiece, though, is “That Was Another Country”, a ballad for infinite spaces in which the electric guitars seem to float over Steve Brown's percussion until bass and acoustic guitar step in to support Karen's voice, intent on painting frescoes of living memories still able to warm the heart.

Crowning a nearly perfect “side A”, the brief “Speak Our Minds” picks up the pace, introduced by a driving bass-and-drums skeleton over which the rest of the band moves with an energy always kept in check by a veneer of romanticism, while “Happy The End” closes out the first half by stretching the atmosphere into a sequence of snapshots of childhood memories in which small details turn into verses of life's poetry (“In this story we sit down on Lunda Bridge/ and catch snow in our cupped hands/ And music is coming from the houses/ Or it sings inside me”).

The bucolic voice-and-acoustic-guitar interlude “Our Harry”, in its disarming fragility, leads into a second half that is even more subdued, one in which melodic openings warm like timid rays of light the composed performances of a Karen Peris who grows ever closer to the description given of her by Peter Himmelman: “Pale, ethereal child, whose voice is a kind of union of spirits, entirely white.”

The singer settles with an almost eerie sweetness into evanescent nocturnal compositions, among which the candid folk song “Go” and the creeping “Everything Is Different Now” stand out, the latter almost like a “Bright As Yellow” replayed by moonlight. The spell is briefly broken by “There”, with its breezy melody deliciously warmed by the glow of the Hammond organ, before the closing track is handed to the spare “I Hear You Say So”, a springtime awakening carried on the wings of a bare acoustic guitar with a distinctly Britpop flavor.

It's the fitting close to an album that, beyond standing out as one of the most exciting and underrated collections of pop songs of the decade, mirrors the new balance the band had struck between the elusive atmospheres of the early '90s and a new chamber-like intimacy, in which Karen Peris's voice stands like a threshold between a fantastical world of childhood memories and an everyday life steeped in poetry.

Sealing a period of artistic fertility that began with the Glow sessions and carried on through the follow-up Birds Of My Neighborhood in 1999, during the second half of the '90s Innocence Mission gathered a handful of songs destined to make up a collection of hidden treasures titled "Small Planes". Released in 2001, the album can hardly be considered a collection of leftovers: the band, growing ever more mature, manages to fold the record into a cohesive sonic narrative built on pared-down arrangements that frame a Karen Peris who here seems to have given way to her own ghost. Her voice turns almost impalpable on the brief opener "Rooftop", an alt-country waltz that opens onto the radiant "Too Early To Say", whose killer, organ-lit chorus has to contend with lyrics of placid resignation ("The sky may open/ But it won't be today").

The mood grows ever more mournful on the little masterpiece "Migration", a spectral ballad in which Don and Karen intertwine their breathless sighs amid a swamp of guitars and a piano that floats as if by miracle. The luminous landscapes of the early albums give way for good to small portraits of solitude: over the panting acoustic strums of "The Girl On My Left", Peris whispers "Some days ring out into night/My failures with people right here", before flowing into the stunning "Song About Traveling", where the drums' muffled, padded pace lets guitar and bass chase each other in a restrained nocturnal dance. And if the piano-and-voice interlude from beyond, "I left the grounds", sounds like a point of no return, the circular title track strains to unfold its petals along the way, despite the bleak uncertainty of its lyrics.

Closing it all out is "I have loved you", in which Karen seems to suddenly reappear alone in her room with her guitar, singing before a window of memories about the joys of a distant love.

“Hope is that thing with feathers” (E. Dickinson)

In 1999, after four years spent searching for a label that would let them keep the project going (and after the birth of their first child), they signed with Kneeling Elephant, an RCA subsidiary. The real turning point, however, was the departure of drummer Steve Brown, who only appears on the percussion for "Snow".

The band's sound evolution, though, is sharp and probably has little to do with the contingent need to do without one member. On Birds Of My Neighborhood, having honed their songwriting on Glow, Innocence Mission arrive at the practical realization of what had been stirring within their souls.

Karen's voice and acoustic guitar; Don's lead guitar; Tim's acoustic bass. Around this scant handful of stars orbits a microcosm of planets, asteroids and meteors, in slow procession and, at times, silent collision. Feelings and affections, small images explode in the mind, vivid and tactile and unforgettable. It is the poetry of Karen's memory reconstructing events just as memory itself does, and we find ourselves rowing across the "lakes of Canada".

"The Lakes of Canada" creates an atmosphere both terrifying and familiar, using sensory language: glowing bulbs and rowboats are made tangible through attention to rhythm, unobtrusive rhymes, and specificity of language. What is so distinctive about Karen Peris's lyrics is the economy of words, concrete nouns—fish, lights, a laughing man—that come alive through melodies that dance across the scale like sea creatures. Panic and joy, a terrible sense of dread, the dark indentations of memory all surface together, accompanied by the laughing strums of an acoustic guitar. This is a song in which everyday objects begin to take on tremendous meaning.

(Sufjan Stevens)

With Birds Of My Neighborhood, Innocence Mission inaugurate the new course that would remain their trademark in the years to come: an aching folk-pop built around a seemingly fragile marital duet. Nurtured with loving care—Karen herself has admitted that making music was a welcome emotional surrogate during the years she couldn't have children—the songs on this record glow with a tender sense of sharing, through which losses and misunderstandings are overcome.

Balconies and flights

of wooden stairs down to the water at low tide.

I’ll carry you and we will walk in the light.

Waiting for you to arrive

where does the time go?

The shy, ancillary melody of "You Are The Light", the angelic north wind of "Going Away", the virgin wonder of "I Haven't Seen This Day Before" all speak of a record in which Karen Peris's inspiration is perhaps at its peak, if not musically then certainly in terms of her grip on the lyrics. It's a puzzle that doesn't need solving, this procession of things and people that is the soul's dream, moving across a snow-covered landscape that grows more inhospitable and muffled the more it manages to bring out the warm stirrings of the heart. Especially extraordinary in this sense is the journey of "Snow", a prayer that seems to take on a personal grief and dissolve it into the snow, turning it into a universal sorrow too.

The band's extraordinary blossoming, their arrival at the magical dimension of a suspected minimalist intensity, carries on the following year with the release, through their own label LAMP, of Christ Is My Hope, a collection of hymns and folk songs. The production is almost nonexistent, so much so that the record feels like a string of homespun odes, occasional moments of prayer ("It Is Well With My Soul") gently anchored by Karen Peris's fragile surrender, seated at the living-room piano or accompanied in passing by her husband's guitar (and voice). Amid the brevity of pieces still steeped in raw fervor ("Morning Star", "No Storms Come"), little hallelujahs packed into a minute and a half, the more fully-realized title track stands out, along with the aching sway of "O Sacred Heart Surrounded" and "Were You There".

The ineffable poetry of "normality"

The band's output continues, slow but unstoppable, without exactly shaking up the world of American record distribution, but enough to land a multi-album deal with San Francisco's Badman. In 2003 came Befriended, in which what stands out is not so much the relative confidence of an already well-honed sound and expressiveness, but the ability to still pull off a small miracle of intensity and self-giving, built with impeccable musical craftsmanship.

Chills run through the waltz of "Look For Me As You Go By", an impetuous lullaby in which every member of the band contributes to the panic-stricken finale, a wish for peace and brotherhood. The Murdoch-like lightness of "When Mac Was Swimming" warms the heart, with its jazzy arrangement, playful piano and synthetic "remembrances".

Befriended offers, with the lovely, dreamy "Martha Avenue Love Song", a chance to describe one of the most fascinating and engaging traits of Karen Peris's songwriting: a gaze of innocence born of experience, a watchful curiosity for things and people that not only survives but is in fact the result of an awareness of a greater design. Songs like "Tomorrow On The Runway" thus take on a power that becomes harmless only to those unwilling to accept its gift: the "artistic source" here is not torment and alienation, but devotion and the pursuit of innocence.

Expressive impulses as rare as they are unfashionable within the singer-songwriter world of previous decades, and yet they show how Karen Peris's work holds inestimable value in its uniqueness.

Befriended is also, on the whole, little more than a sequel to the "revelation" of Birds Of My Neighborhood. There are no real standout tracks; everything rests on Karen's interpretive skills and on Don's guitar arrangements - always of the highest caliber.

In perfect mirror of what happened around Birds Of My Neighborhood, Befriended is followed, a year later, by a charity release made up largely of reworkings. Now The Day Is Over is a compilation of some of the most famous songs (from "Over The Rainbow" to "Moon River", but above all "(What A) Wonderful World"), transformed for the occasion into lullabies.

A musical of the soul, a rarefied snowy whirl, Now The Day Is Over deftly sidesteps the suspicions of anyone expecting a crowd-pleasing effort, steeped in the plastic blandness of a last-minute Christmas cash-in. As happens when true artists manage to make their own interpretations already so deeply rooted in the collective imagination as to constitute a language, a universal expression, the "chamber" versions of "Moon River" and "Edelweiss" - for anyone unfamiliar with the latter: it's the main theme from "Tutti insieme appassionatamente" - resonate with a new spirit, that of someone who relives in great works of the past what she tries to express every day through her own music.

The irresistible tear of the traditional "Bye-Lo", performed a cappella by Karen (dizzying once again on "Over The Rainbow"), the pianistic dream of a "Miracle In Milan" in "Somewhere A Star Shines For Everyone" intertwine indistinguishably with the "little match girl" serenade of "My Love Goes With You": not a classic from the past or a traditional lullaby, but the album's only original piece.

Don Peris, two years after his solo debut, once again shows just how crucial his guitar mastery, the delicacy of his touch and his modest yet ingenious craftsmanship have been and continue to be to the sound of Innocence Mission, with his guitar-and-bass arrangement of Chopin's "Prelude In A" and Beethoven's "Sonata No.8".

Childhood dreams lived out by adults spin securely in the warmth of home, while gusts of ice and snow lash at the windows; for a moment, humanity seems redeemed, and pure.

A radiant maturity "among the trees"

We are in the wind, planting the maples

We meet an older man who seems to know

I miss my dad.

And he smiles through the limbs.

We talk easily with him

until the rain begins.

This is the brotherhood of man

This is the humanity Karen Peris has in mind: made of remembrances, attuned to the biorhythm of nature and of people, yet never tamed into a quaint little picture of faded ideals. A vivid poetry, that of "Happy Birthday": all it takes is a wreath of maple leaves to kindle the scents of that faded photograph of laughing young faces.

The poetics of signs, so modest and earthbound as to seem born of a child God's imagination, is reflected in this "brotherhood of man" (a concept that also recurs in "Colors Of The World"), a fragile and luminous web of outstretched hands, painted by the band in tones both muted and brilliant at once.

The Truth buried within confused and multiform reality is thus revealed through the gentle melodic shifts of "Love That Boy", in the tender escapism of "Over The Moon", in the defenseless fragility of "A Wave Is Rolling", with its "onomatopoeic" arrangement. Nursery-rhyme tones of childlike innocence mark the light breeze of "Since I Still Tell You My Every Day" - a weave of acoustic guitar and piano that cries out in wonder - which cannot, however, conceal the band's newfound maturity.

It would indeed be too easy, even for those lucky enough to recount the fascinating career of Innocence Mission, to simply settle in and bask beneath one of the many flowering trees that grow among the notes of We Walked In Song, lulled by the sometimes overwhelming dream of the band's music. The need for critical reconstruction falls a bit by the wayside when faced with a band like Innocence Mission, in whose presence one would rather doze off, forgetting Evil altogether, or at least feeling ready to face it.

One has to admit, though, that this 2007 record perhaps betrays a certain weariness with the minimalist formula — at times radically so — of the third-millennium Innocence Mission. Tracks like "Lake Shore Drive" prove it, with that arrangement of dreamlike, almost estranging elegance that seeps through beneath, or rather above, Karen Peris's usual confessional warmth.

Something is missing from We Walked In Song, and that's why the humble intensity of the faithful — radiant yet muted — can be mistaken for the "weak thought" of a domestic collage of moods and melancholy.

This subtle veneer of opacity turns out to be nothing more than a natural fluctuation in the sensibility of Don, Karen and Mike. My Room In The Trees comes out a full three years later, in 2010, and the time it took to get there already says a lot about how it turned out.

From the very first gentle strumming of "Rain (Setting Out In The Leafy Boat)", we find ourselves wandering again through the Peris household, and discover that nothing has changed. Everything is still intact: the immaculate floral wallpaper, grandma's unbreakable tea set, the scent of memories shared together still lingering unchanged between the living room and the kitchen. Karen's slender voice hasn't lost its ability to slip through ever-open gaps, even in the most withered heart, drawing out first a sweet melancholy and then, finally, wonder. The wonder of discovering, hidden within gentle movements of piano and acoustic guitar, the secret of how clouds move — and of so many other things, both obvious and hidden, within the clear impression of childhood.

The vivid stillness of the buildings in the cover's background, broken by the faint, unquenchable call of a lone tree, already speaks of the Gondry-esque place of the soul on which this new work rests. A promise of elusive happiness glimpsed through rain-soaked windows on a New England afternoon, a childhood memory sadly blurred: and yet everything is vividly within reach.

The trickling violin of "Rain (Setting Out In The Leafy Boat)", a fortifying lullaby, is a rent in the veil that leads into a dream — not a fleeting hallucination but a clear remembrance populated with affection: Karen Peris's voice is its infallible guide.

The first part of the album is an inexorable progression, a thrilling carousel of gems in which every appearance is a thread that compresses and refines emotions into a glowing core: the defenseless, trusting blossoming of "God Is Love", the verdant union of "Gentle The Rain At Home", the fragrant twilight of "Spring"... And yet it's nothing more than a preparatory path, a soothing anesthetic, needed to withstand the emotional impact of the pianistic sketch of "North American Field Song". "Stay calm!", Karen whispers, as she gently but firmly strips away whatever rot and malice has festered over time in the crevices of the deepest Self.

One is then free to soar along the punctuation marks of the instrumentals "Mile-Marker" (a Don composition, here a skilled finisher and attentive accomplice throughout the album) and "The Melendys Go Abroad", as if Karen's voice had become part of one's own biological cycle. After the loving violence inflicted on the body, the more honeyed composure of the second half comes as a relief: a well-earned convalescence sheltered among the branches ("The Leaves Left High", "I'd Follow If I Could", "Shout For Joy").

Something truly unheard-of since the days of Birds Of My Neighborhood is rekindled in My Room In The Trees: not only because of the renewed restraint in the arrangements, now bolstered by a fully mature expressive lyricism, but above all because of the strict, pure dictates of its spirit. It's here that the miracle takes place for which we owe thanks to Karen and Don Peris and Mike Biggs.

In 2015, after Karen and Don's solo works, came Hello I Feel The Same. Listening to a new record by the duo means discovering, every time, that someone on the other side of the ocean feels just like you, deep down. And so that conversation resumes, the one Karen feels part of, the one she can't join by speaking, only by singing. Anyone who's heard her knows how hard it is to write about it with any detachment, trying as always to bring some order to the torrent of information raining down on us every day.

It doesn't take Karen long to make herself heard, conversing with Don's limping arpeggios as if in a radiant morning of convalescence, in the nursery-rhyme-like title track, which culminates precisely in a "Hello, hello, hello/I feel the same".

Compared to its predecessor — utterly inspired, but with more direct, "earthbound" arrangements — Hello I Feel The Same more faithfully recreates the enchanted world, of Miyazaki-esque nobility — and thus of ever-living curiosity and respect for the human soul — belonging to the Peris couple. That world buried in snow, where people seemed to wander about more like creatures of spirit than of flesh, found in Birds Of My Neighborhood. Karen's solo record from a couple of years earlier enriches the album with scattered, moving piano notes, coloring the (inner?) dialogue of "When The One Flowered Suitcase", one of the album's peaks, with its story of wandering figures, colored shadows in a hostile and incomprehensible world, that Karen takes by the hand.

A sense of motion, like an invisible outstretched hand, permeates the record, and so the mute instrumental "Barcelona", which echoes Kings Of Convenience with its chamber-pop reworking of Spanish idioms, becomes a vehicle for unspoken emotions. As already noted, it's the different approach to the arrangements — gentler than on My Room In The Trees — that elevates Hello I Feel The Same: "Tom On The Boulevard" is the song Kozelek would write, if he still had the strength within him to let it blossom the way it does in the simple grandeur of this album.

But "Washington Field Trip" is the record's true emotional peak, a track whose sudden drop in tone during the interlude harks back to the late '80s, when the band was born, with guitar and piano arrangements sculpting an unforgettable scene of snowflakes and trickling water, against which Karen's aching fragility stands out in sharp relief.

The emotional climax leading up to "Barcelona" is so demanding that the second half of the record feels like an act of mercy, offering songs that are less immediately striking, meant to be sipped slowly, to be discovered "all over again". Right away comes the tingling rush of emotion that is "State Park", one of the most successful lullabies from a band that has dedicated an entire album to lullabies, complete with its parade of luminescent kodama. "Fred Rogers" revives a sonic idea that harks back to the band's more indie-pop past, with its dry, spare sound.

It's worth stressing that Innocence Mission have never lost sight of their pop instincts: even here the songs remain short, and are still centered on vocal melodies.

And so it is that we arrive, through a kind of inner glowing knot that has steadily grown in size, at the piano-and-voice closer "The Color Green", in which Karen seems to explain the transformation that has taken place, the music that seems to come from buildings, from the passing of time and weather, from other people. "The color green has come inside of me": a chromatic symbol for something simple and exceedingly rare, the fact that there's no going back once you've heard the music of Innocence Mission.

Needless to say, three years on, the intimate folk magic of the Peris couple is renewed, where joy and melancholy meet and feed off each other until they become indistinguishable: the ten vignettes of Sun On The Square seem draped in a mild evening light, filtered through the curtains of a plain yet welcoming domestic interior.

“I cannot find a thing/ Beautiful enough for you/ Again. […] And where will I find this/ Perfect and wondrous?”. Emotion gives rise to words, and from them a window opens onto the world, tinted in the yellows and greens of autumn hues. The language, as always, is that of someone who knows love and the divine source that makes it pure and unassailable.

Simple, caressing verses, sung as if they were lullabies, telling of distances that can only be bridged by imagination, that place of the soul where the air smells of Paris, dry leaves and quiet, uncrowded avenues.

Thirty years of making music side by side, and not a single wrinkle in their miniature sound, a secret kept safe within the true independent, homemade underground, where poetic flourishes are never flashy or lush, yet from them bloom words of a brief splendor that knows no seasons.

The new album by the Peris couple, their second for Bella Union, has all the lightness and tenderness of a Rohmer film: See You Tomorrow. Deserted, tree-lined avenues wrapped in fog, brief fragments of childhood memories, born at the piano in a New England living room. Anyone who knows Karen Peris's voice wouldn't hesitate to put it forward for Unesco World Heritage status, and "See You Tomorrow" doesn't fail to challenge even the most unmoved listener, starting with the opening "The Brothers Williams Said".

It's partly the now unshakeable fixity of the duo's music that makes this new record, however stylistically compelling for the restraint of its arrangements and its subtle, well-aimed production, one of the less convincing entries in an otherwise outstanding second (third?) act of Innocence Mission's career.

If, on the level of arrangements, we're indeed looking at one of the duo's most accomplished and fully realized albums ("I Would Be There", the accordions of "Stars That Fall Away From Us"), on the level of songwriting there are, in truth, no tracks that stand out within their discography, and, were it not for Karen's voice, there would be little emotional departure from the record's "average" mood either.

Even so, this is a record that adds to the band's catalogue rather than diminishing it, and one that hints at a path in which the move to Bella Union is not merely a "lifetime achievement" gesture, but also a renewal of ambition, why not, while awaiting the real recognition - that of the public - which may not be long in coming.

Ever more ethereal and innocent, Karen Peris's voice remains the true trademark of Innocence Mission. That doesn't mean that Mike Bitts's caressing bass lines and Don Peris's elegant, understated guitar touch are merely a backdrop to the band's ever-refined chamber-folk-pop. In fact, it's precisely the soft, introspective instrumental approach of the two musicians that makes Midwinter Swimmers (2024) one of the most intense chapters in the Peris couple's long career. Innocence Mission once again place at the center of their music that naif, childlike innocence inescapably bound up with memory, with a bygone time that can only be relived by renouncing the lure of consumerism and the superfluous. There's no syrupy sentimentality or melodic pandering here: the songs are built on fine, simple arpeggios and airy harmonies that glide by with astonishing naturalness ("This Thread Is A Green Street"), brushing against a neo-classicism often entrusted to crystalline, essential notes, or to lofty, pristine piano notes that caress the soul ("The Camera Divides The Coast Of Maine").

The piano sound of the otherworldly "We Would Meet In Center City" conjures noble neoclassical touches, dream-pop echoes and neo-symphonic suggestions brimming with urgency and feeling; with equal ardor, the fluid folk-jazz of "John Williams" carries the scent of innocence and the first stirrings of genuine sensuality. Subtle psychedelic textures offer further creative lift, brushing against saudade in the delicate bossa nova of "Your Saturday Picture" and in the even more intense "Sisters And Brothers", as well as the magic of West Coast music in "Orange Of The Westering Sun". Yet it's in "Cloud To Cloud" that the magic of "Midwinter Swimmers" is ultimately distilled, a slender melody that a rich interplay of arrangement and composition elevates into a moment of pure beauty. Never so expansive and generous before, Innocence Mission land one of their finest albums ever, with songs marked by incisiveness and harmonic clarity. A record that exalts the most mystical and sentimental side of folk right up to the last precious notes of "A Different Day", a song unlikely to leave anyone unmoved.

Lorenzo Righetto: Birds Of My Neighborhood, Christ Is My Hope, Befriended, Now The Day Is Over, We Walked In Song, My Room In The Trees, Hello I Feel The Same, See You Tomorrow

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