Was introduced to this album my freshman year in college 91-92. Fell in love with IM. This is still in my top 10 albums for my life. Just beautiful. It's the only CD I own now. Repurchased a few years ago after realizing it wasn't going to hit the streaming services.
I fell in love with my wife (now my ex-wife) to this Innocence Mission album in 1991...smoking clove cigarettes and drinking Turkish coffee in Philly's Rittenhouse Square. Thanks to WXPN radio for bringing this music to the public eye.
One of the most beautiful song Ive ever beard. It sends you on a whole journey where you understand how deeply moved the narrator is by gestures of love and acceptance. It makes me wish everyone in the world could have a friend like described in the song. It also reminds me of “Lakes of Canada” in terms of capturing vulnerability strength and a moment of belonging.
Wound Theatre Innocence Mission’s “Umbrella” (1991) Tears for Fears were overt about their therapy ‘platform’. The Innocence Mission were modest, cloaking it first under a veil of poetical art, without a claim as to whether healing would visit the listener. With Sennheiser HD600 phones yesterday I was rejoined to the sustained depth, texture and splendor of Umbrella’s overall cinematic unity. Their second studio album is the most texturally coherent collection of all their records. Almost 40 years later, though they have journeyed through several chapters of approach and mood, Umbrella remains a masterpiece of acoustic mise-en-scene, of building a song world where each piece reveals the same named space and perfectly extends it. Anyone want to give a ‘best-in-show’ blue ribbon for a contemporary American popular music recording at an imaginary national ‘state’ fair of the year 1991? It could go to this great album. The five strange legacy "reviews" at Wikipedia today seem authored by persons who didn't bother to lean in and listen, opting for a surficial gesture check with whoever was causing a buzz on MTV at the time. One writer even derisively called it 'art rock'. Which is what it actually is. But, “pretentious”? Maybe all poetry is pretentious too? Umbrella probably went over quite a few professional heads in real time back in the day. I would hold it up as an exceptionally sensitive, literary, restrained, hopeful variant, which still sounds like nobody’s else’s record, not even another in their own catalog. Musically/technically, I think of The Carpenters "Close to You"; moving in the same mode of absolutely accurate pitch, ravishing, calming musical beauty and luminous clarity of presentation. They are labelmates after all, compliments, A&M. [Now can you release the analog master rights, so a sota vinyl edition could be issued? ] It is an achievement that abundantly stands up 3+ decades later in view of the gallery of clean guitars, organic rock-free drumming and relentlessly poetic words and vocal delivery. Almost all of the Christian Worship bands of the present are following this non-orthodox model of open-ended drumming marked by drive and complexity. Though they picked ‘umbrella’ as a symbol of frailty and spiritual shelter, it takes on other colors when you consider the descent of the United States, then and now. The melancholia isn’t just that of increasingly marginalized catholics, but watching a nation begin to evaporate in cultural decay, decrease in mental health. Contact with any innocence is bound to smart. Simple Minds’ Sparkle in the Rain, (bombastic by comparison) shares a spirit that is close: glistening rain seen behind window panes. The marvel is that the Innocence Mission built a song world that sounds like that grey and glistening rain, sweeping in a sense of refuge and comfort, assurance in a preserving interior life…but still savoring somehow the pain of the weathers too. Yet it never actually reaches night on Umbrella. They might have alternately called it The Secret Joy of Day Rain. I have listened to just about all of the quartet recordings to date, and this one remains the miracle of what fellow Kevin Mooney said here: “a complete album”. That is a very high bar. Like a Pennsylvania quilt (….but not a crazy quilt…) very skillfully and maturely assembled given their youth. They were all only at or near age 26. Natalie Merchant and Kate Bush imitation? Forget it. No one will ever sound like Karen Peris on “Now in this hush” or “Flags”; a voice of purity that soothes as only a woman’s can, but at the same time resist all description. S. Taylor Sykesville, MD
The more I listen to MICE, the more these songs grow on me and I begin to love them. I missed the MICE project at the time, and it's only recently I've found places to listen to these songs. And they're great!
This song just absolutely levels. The bone-piercing mood radiates right through me, the masterful arrangement/production/instrument voicing (so difficult to showcase the purity and unadorned brilliance of a Strat without it tracking too thin)...that outro and its perfect chorusing warble, and last but not least, that other dimension that is the break between verses. Such an incredible achievement. I wish I knew someone I could share this with who would appreciate it even 10% as much as I do. I wish I lived in a world where this wasn't obscure.
Still pull this one out now and then. All of the songs are very good and some are excellent! The whole album holds up pretty well. Hard to believe it's 30 years old already.
it sounds like a new england autumn. i lost my dad then got divorced all in one year and this album inspired me to paint and draw which helped me navigate those two experiences. 1991, almost as if it was someone else’s life, yet this slbum is a time capsule bringing my heart right back to those days… the sweetness of time is that i only recall it as a very creative time not a painful one and the music is what inspired the creativity. thanks for posting this gem
All of their albums are so good, I used to gravitate towards Birds or Glow as their most consistent from top to bottom but it might be Umbrella. Just incredible.
Oh, bless me, am I going silent now? Oh, have I overnight been emptied? If I could call these thoughts to come, to stand on this paper I could read what I mean, may I? May I? Oh, bless me, now I seem to come apart, to sink Inside this overwhelming, what can I do? What have I made of all of these new days? And forgive my despair Where is color this hour? Where is music this hour? Are they still going on somewhere? But where now, in this hush? Where are words in this hush? And what am I? Oh, bless us for we give our hearts to fear For so we give our minds to worry If I could brush this sorrow dust from off of our faces And see our joy again, may I? May I? Oh, let us make a joyful noise resound Oh, let us make a noise and hear it
