The first studio album from the innocence mission in four years, Midwinter Swimmers 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 album.

“It’s like it was recorded at Western Electric in the 60’s, and makes me think of Vashti Bunyan or Sibylle Baier, but also has these emotional bursts of orchestration and drums and harmony coming in – the sound of the innocence mission never stops getting richer”, writes one early listener and friend.

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. And the transportive quality of scenes we might come upon in the natural world, or even in everyday objects. So, one image is a sewing thread imagined as a street map, maybe accompanied by a small film that plays in the mind’s eye, of a reunion with an absent loved one. One of the things about recording it was, how to find this feeling inside the sound, and how to find the half-remembered beauty of sing-alongs of our 1970’s childhoods. There’s a search in recording that goes on being elusive, in a good way.”

‘This Thread…’ is the first of a trio of songs on the new album (the second being the title song) about missing a loved one who is away, and of how love can transcend distance, Karen says.  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. It takes place during an instant when swimmers seen at a distance through tears are refracted and appear as something beautiful and moving. 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.

This attentiveness to small detail typifies the way the innocence mission’s songs look closely at everyday moments as miraculous worlds of their own. Karen’s words stand on their own as 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.

In ‘Your Saturday Picture’ a loved one who has moved has “sent a painting they made of their new surroundings and now it is on the wall and being a visual bridge. The longing to really see the same things, colors, sounds that the other person is seeing and experiencing, so that the distance is crossed and is not as immense.” Built around Karen’s bossa nova guitar and bass line and her exquisite, expressive voice, with a central image of walking down a long city street under trees, this is ultimately a song about the continuity of love. There is an atmosphere created by Don’s ride cymbal-heavy drum kit and electric guitar and the quality of reverb around the voice that sounds like the images she saw when writing the song, Karen says.

Walking is a recurrent happening in Peris’ songs, as she finds herself taking walks on most days of the year, and looking up into trees, which continue to be another feature of her lyrics. In one verse of closing song ‘A Different Day’, she 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 to record the innocence mission’s first two albums. “This was at Joni Mitchell’s house, and the air always smelled like lilies so it became Easter-like, which may have been one of the reasons that there was the feeling of being at the start of something”, Karen remembers. (In a full-circle experience, Karen, whose first favorite song at five years old was ‘Both Sides Now’ was invited by Joni to sing on her album Night Ride Home, an honor she treasures.) The song’s refrain states, “In plain sight the beauty of someone may emerge”, suggesting a miraculous possibility surrounding her own longing to be the person she is intended to be.

Nearer to home, on the opposite US coast, a dramatic, rocky seaside place called Two Lights in Cape Elizabeth is the setting of the album’s dynamic, ambient third song, ‘The Camera Divides the Coast of Maine’. Karen explains the song is “thinking about the nature of place in regard to time – when we think of going back, is it as if to visit an earlier time in our lives? I often think of the Ivan Lalic poem (Places We Love We Can Never Leave) that says something like: Is this a street or years?”

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 playing. Their longtime friend Mike Bitts (Don and Mike met in their brief time in Cub scouts when they were 8-year-olds, and the three began playing music together at around age 16) adds a further dimension of upright and electric bass parts to many of the songs. Piano is another integral element of the album’s melodic and emotional center.

About the moving and rhythmic ‘Sisters and Brothers’, ‘John Williams’, and ‘A Hundred Flowers’, Don Peris says, “It’s easy for me to trace a line from those songs back to Befriended (their landmark 2003 album), especially to the songs ‘When Mac Was Swimming’ and ‘Martha Avenue Love Song’, and to be bolstered and comforted by them. There is a realistic joy and gratitude, in the midst of life’s difficulties, that are expressed in the lyrics, through the companionship of Karen’s familiar voice.