The Innocence Mission: Midwinter Swimmers review – lo-fi soft focus on the beauty of everyday life

Sufjan Stevens once described his enduring love of Pennsylvania’s the Innocence Mission by explaining that for all his awe at big songs, Broadway musicals and all, he would always return to “small songs which make careful observations about everyday life”. After meeting in a high school play, the band have made a dozen such albums since their 1989 debut, each based around frontwoman Karen Peris’s childlike, otherworldly vocal. On this exquisite 13th studio album, the sparse instrumentation and soft focus, lo-fi production gives the music an affectingly ethereal, distant quality, which the singer-songwriter says is intended to rekindle “the half-remembered beauty of singalongs of our 1970s childhoods”.

Her husband Don’s delicately strummed guitars, Mike Bitts’ gently plucked bass and occasional piano frame songs of indefinable yearning, pitched somewhere between Vashti Bunyan and Galaxie 500. In This Thread Is a Green Street, daily objects operate as a “side doorway” to memories of people lost. The words are audibly informed by literature and poetry. In the title track, the singer compares the imminent arrival of a loved one to “March, with the snowdrops and magnolias”. Orange of the Westering Sun recalls the lily-smelling air when they recorded their first two albums at Joni Mitchell’s house. Other lyrics are less clear, but some phrases leap out: “Let’s go out together dancing” or “Can you meet me?” As with Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser, the words don’t always need to be intelligible when the feeling is enough.