If this was a normal review I could get by in a few lines.

I could simply tell you that The Innocence Mission is a duo from Pennsylvania, composed by Don and Karen Peris, a couple in art as in life, and that for about thirty years has been carrying out its own caressing musical proposal, careless of the noise of the surrounding world that on the other hand it seems to reciprocate by ignore the beauty that they carry on.
I could also say that “Sun On The Square” follows the touching “Hello I Feel The Same” released in 205, and that it proposes an intimate and dreamy folk built around Don’s crystalline guitar and the subtle and nearly childish voice of Karen. An evocative music composed of fragile songs wrapped in a suspended atmosphere and enriched by delicate orchestral arrangements.

These words would be enough to describe the record, but certainly they would not capture the true essence and in all probability would end up being archived as and the usual dream folk work or so. The limit of this type of music often lies precisely in the abuse of the stylistic form itself. The risk for those who frequent this genre is to find albums in which the songs go around in circles in dreamy atmospheres, giving the impression of a homogeneous and indistinct mass which, though pleasant, can be perceived as borring, being forgotten too soon.

So let’s get to the point: why Innocence Mission should be different? What makes the disc in question worthy of listening?
In my opinion the key is their deep authenticity. The music of the Peris spouses appears to be deeply distant from the poses that sometimes characterize similar artists. Their own discography that is not very large and that is characterized by long pauses, suggests that for these artists the publication of a disc is not so much a deadline to be respected but a real personal and artistic need.
This characteristic is therefore reflected in the writing. The songs in fact seem to flow in a completely natural way and convey the impression of having been conceived already in the clothes in which we listen to them on disk. Each piece has an innate identity and this allows to avoid the danger of creating a homogeneous mass with little personality.

The other factor that emerges strongly is family dimension: the listener finds himself immersed in an almost homely atmosphere capable of making him feel at ease.
This ability to convey a feeling of warmth makes the difference compared to a lot of analogous music in which intimacy is more often evoked than real, constructed rather than sincere.

As we said the road traveled by the the couple is long and not substantially departing from disc to disc but with the passing of time they seem to perfect their chamber folk prototype more and more, gradually acquiring an ever greater compositional maturity.

In particular in “Sun On The Square” some gems really shine. In “Green Bus” Karen’s voice, in perfect symbiosis with Don’s arpeggiated guitar, gives us a simple but memorable refrain and an exciting string arrangement. It is wonderful then to be lulled by the timeless grace of “Look out from your window” underlined by an evocative passage in which piano and cello play in unison. In the poignant “Shadow of the pines” the melody is accompanied by an accordion embroidery that together with the lavish orchestral crescendo at the step of waltz take us back to elegant atmospheres from the old continent.

It’s a disc with a properly brief playing time and when, accompanied by the suffused choruses of Don and Karen, “Galvanic” leads us to the end, we can breathe again after 34 minutes of apnea and suspension from reality, pampered by the warmth of a welcoming hearth, that of The Innocence Mission. (If this were a normal review, we should now indicate a vote, but since quantifying such intimate music numerically would mean to debasing it and considering that, as announced, this is not a normal review … RATING: … ..)

By Mason

Originally published in italian on September 14 2018
Republished in english on May 11 2019