Innocence Mission – Birds Of My Neighborhood

When I was a kid, growing up in deepest South Texas, our family used to make an annual wintertime pilgrimage to Colorado to go skiing. My mental kinescope reel of those trips always renders them in stark black-and-white, a series of sensations as well as images — landscapes covered in pristine snow, the bite of icy wind while riding a skilift, the smell of my father’s pipe. And the soundtrack music I hear is something like Birds Of My Neighborhood, the fourth album by the Innocence Mission.

Gossamer as a snowflake, Birds Of My Neighborhood is so delicate it threatens to melt upon close examination. But the trio’s quiet acoustic strumming has the power to arrest, moving between new-agey contemporary folk and Velvet Underground-style indie-rock drones. The sound is ambient and spare, spotlighting Karen Peris’ little-girl quaver. Somehow she avoids seeming precious or cloying, like Natalie Merchant without the annoying didactic aftertaste.

One gets the feeling Peris and her bandmates (husband/guitarist Don Peris and bassist Mike Bitts) would never presume to preach, although there is ample spiritual content to these songs. But it’s an understated spirituality that finds God in details — the curve of a snow-covered hill, Neil Young’s voice on the radio, the shadows cast by pine trees, John Denver.

That’s right, John Denver. It was a shock to cue up this album for the first time and hear a completely irony-free cover of Denver’s “Follow Me”, a 1970 chestnut I remember from my parents’ eight-track tapes on those long drives up to Colorado. Birds Of My Neighborhood may not quite be a rocky mountain high, but it is ideal mood music for your next reverie.