Written by: Dave Cantrell

Oh, does it never end? On the mildly disturbing regular, albums drop out of the sky and into my lap by (luminously talented and most often longstanding) artists that have somehow evaded what I like to consider my still-active, ever-curious radar. While not a new lament – ref. the Lightning Strikes column from some years back that should clearly never have been allowed to lapse – it nonetheless troubles me (in the bestest way, mind) that full-lengths keep appearing in the post box from projects whose lineage traces back nearly a dozen years (in one instance here) if not freakin’ decades (the other instance here) and, while it’s usually true (as it half is here) that I’ve at least heard of them it’s also inevitably true that I haven’t actually heard them, a sin for which myself, like anyone, can be absolved because who can hear everything no one but regardless the sting of nagging regret is real as any of you similarly afflicted with the ‘gotta hear everything that might be interesting and/or worthy’ gene can attest. Thus it’s no small consolation to this obsessive when, in my quasi-professional capacity as senior editor here at SEM, two highly worthy new albums arrive semi-simultaneously that in style and substance offer the generous opportunity to bundle them together into a single review. Inadequate as it might be relative to those just-expressed purist ambitions, at least it’s something. So, first, the ‘eldest’ of the two (we’ll get to Trust Fund’s Has It Been A While? in a short, um, while), The Innocence Mission, consisting of wife/husband Karen and Don Peris (the former guitars and a dozen other roles, not least primary songwriter, the latter guitar drums and voice), and longtime mate/bassist Mike Bitts, whose, ahem, fourteenth full-length released November 29th on Bella Union.

Called midwinter swimmers – that title, as is the (umm, lower) case with the band themselves, is uncapitalized, a choice that extends to the song titles as well all of which, in a subtle if quietly emphatic way, ties stylistically to the material itself which we’ll discover in a sec – it’s a collection of songs that, were there such a thing, would have to rank near the top of a ‘Best Fourteenth Albums of All Time’ list. Bold in its relative mellowness, its songs echoing with an assurance that seems to hit that mythical sweet spot between too over- or too under-confident, it also just happens to be, from an atmospheric standpoint, pretty much the ideal record to mark that all-too-fleeting moment when autumn in all its gloaming officially transitions its way toward winter, a mood territory one suspects is not foreign to this band whether we’re talking literal or metaphorical.

From opening track “This Thread is a Green Street,” its echoing ambience suggesting an early-era, Dylan-inflected busker strumming their nylon heartstrings out down a subway passageway, Karen exploring in a voice that, throughout, somehow manages to marry the waif-ish to the somewhat world-weary, the potential middle lane between the daily mundane and spiritually sublime, walking a kind of Main Street that maps like a tightrope down the center of what we might call our City of the Heart, through the dolorously lovely title track, an adjectival pairing that makes a beautiful, basic sense essaying, as the song does, love and loneliness in equal measure, which makes every sense seeing as they’re two sides of the same proverbial coin; the lowing, subtly dramatic hum of the wonderfully-titled “The Camera Divides the Coast of Maine;” the damn near devotional love song “Cloud to Cloud,” its bassline creeping measure to measure with that tiptoeing certainty that instrument is so renowned for, the track in its full band wholeness blooming with strength like fresh love itself; the tender bossa nova-touched swing of “Sisters and Brothers” that morphs with the subtlety of nature itself into a joyous pile-on of a love song singalong, handclaps and all, to last track “A Different Day,” an acoustic, translucent yearner of a song that finds singer and band walking – nearly levitating, in fact – hand in hand toward a dusk that, though inevitable, always seems a hushed breath away, you’re in some strong gentle hands here, the album entire uniquely reassuring even in its occasional moments of uncertainty. Ultimately, midwinter swimmers lissome sprawl of moods and styles both affix seamlessly on to the band’s preceding baker’s dozen while also, in its own allusive manner, encapsulating that history like a greatest hits album containing all new, never-before-heard greatest hits. [get your copy here]

 Meanwhile, across the chilly waters of the Atlantic, another album the release of which also builds on a provenance of some, umm, note has caught our restless attention here at SEM.

Like a Kevin Ayers arriving at a summer’s idyll after traipsing all along the troubadours way checking into wayposts established by the likes of your Simons and Garfunkels, your Belles and Sebastians, your Andres Segovias had they been born in the mid-20th century instead of the tailend of the 19th, Ellis Jones, AKA to those in the know – which this writer to his usual discredit was not until this latest sixth full-length dropped into his aforementioned post box about a month ago or so – as the singular creative force behind the project known as Trust Fund, has rearisen after a half-dozen year semi-hiatus (that ‘semi’ fronting ‘hiatus’ necessitated by the fact that five lone tracks dropped across the calendar in 2022 and ’23) with the thereby aptly-titled Has It Been A While?, an album that, as both a primer for yours truly and a long-awaited balm to the Trust Fund faithful, could not be more welcome

Delicate but steadfast (a phrase that, come to think of it, could arguably not better situate the somewhat Nick Drake-adjacent Trust Fund aesthetic), first track “Leaving the Party Early,” Jones’s deft acoustic picking gently attended by a sympathetic touch of violin – arranged by the non-music reading singer, played by Maria Grig – is as lovely an engaging, intelligent opener as anyone could hope for, acting in its unassuming way as a guiidepost of what’s to come.

From its first breath – in this case breathed by Celia MacDougall, a brilliantly lucent vocal foil throughout HIBAW? – next up “The Mirrors” plucky but gentle agility sports a melodic base to, as is said, die for. Past the brief, early morning dreamstate of “This Life” there’s the easy, madrigalistic charm of “Curtis” that, mood-wise, suggests – on this writer’s first listen – that transfixing twinkle of dust in the air at dusk, late winter/early spring; the stately, swaying pop of “Until Now,” Jones in his higher register, the jaunty saw of that violin (and the ever-so-subtle inclusion of cello) redolent of, I dunno, a quick trip across the moors, which is appropriate as the track leads straight to “The Hinterland,” a thoughtful portrait of a sort depicting – and directed toward – someone born in said wilds among “artisans and farmers who you admired but did not wish to be” that also contains, in a stanza concerning the often constrictive social dynamics of secondary school, one of the finest, most concise lines regarding that never-uncomplicated time: “You would tell them how you felt, if you knew.”

And that’s the thing about this artist, this album. There’s this quality of the understated that’s so carefully – and, most often, as just mentioned, tenderly – wrought as to bring a moment’s pause, a quality so prevalent not just here but historically as well (and, yes, we went back to catch up, due diligence and all) that it can rightfully be considered a Trust Fund trademark. Not to lard this review with too much embarrassment-of-riches evidence but mention must be made of, say, “A Wooden Nickel,” with its suave but grounded samba groove that could not better exemplify Jones’s grasp of craft, the song, quietly insistent, sound both coy and wholly uncoy in the same breath, or the half love song, half rogue tribute that is “I Look For Him” that in two minutes and change maps the oblique yet unmasked way the heart tends to chase its own tail when it tries to distinguish love from reckless fascination, a dilemma none of us escape and that right there underlines the universality at play here, none of which is to even mention the subtle, seemingly unselfconscious cleverness of lyric from start to finish here, not least on the title track (“I never even thought once of/our boundless, countless months of//love, if you’ve been watching/you’ll only have seen me smile” – seldom have nuance and plainspokenness flowed into one another with such (seeming) ease). But what may well be the most notable achievement here is, with some irony, the economy of purpose. The majority of this album’s songs fail to reach the three-minute mark and only two surpass three-and-a-half and yet not a one of them suffers, there’s no sense of imposed brevity, each track as sumptuous and whole as its neighbor. The song, as it should be, is paramount, receiving just what it needs – and not a soupçon more – to make it work and work splendidly. In all contexts, beauty, as we all know, is fleeting, a fact Mr. Jones here seems to not just know but owns. Has It Been A While?, as a result, is simply one of 2024’s finest gems. [get the Tapete-released Has It Been A While? here]

In the blink-and-you-missed it world of new releases we’re always pleased to be stopped still in our daily routine as albums from heretofore unknown-to-us artists (or underknown as with the innoncence mission) get their first spin on the office stereo. Most of our editorial decisions are based on a largely instinctual calculus that uses as its basis the usual factors of talent, reputation, and personal taste, a loose litmus test which many, too many albums pass at which point we turn to the ‘time+energy+luck of the draw (i.e. whim)’ formula but then, despite that flimsy, admittedly imperfect process, an album lands on our desk then on the stereo from which it takes up immediate residence in the SEM heart. Both these recordings, due their grace and agility, their unforced intuitive and empathetic reach, easily find a home in that heart and we cannot overstate our gratitude. I’m sometimes asked if any of us get paid writing for Stereo Embers and whereas, speaking monetarily, we don’t, work of this caliber, that’s this satisfying, complicate the answer. Enough said.