Early Day Miners - All Harm Ends Here (Secretly Canadian)
Early Day Miners' music has always been more about place than people or feelings. Location often conjures feelings or, at least, mood, but the setting was always the focus. Despite the band's Indiana home, the first two albums took stake in the Southwest before shifting east to the Reconstructionist South for Jefferson at Rest. For the band's fourth album, All Harm Ends Here, the band retains their Hopper-esque realism but doesn't limit the songs to one region. The album paints contrasting portraits, comparing quiet starry nights and calm rivers of country and small town life with the isolation and view of red brick and fire escapes provided by city life.
With the less focused locale, compared to previous albums, more space is provided for pure emotions to drift in, writing more directly about fear, separation, and pain. For better or worse, this direct emotion blurs the line even more between the band and its influences. Album opener "Errance" sounds like a Seam song. After a delicate, hushed vocal section, the bridge flows beautifully with very lyrical, buzzing guitars. "Comfort/Guilt" isn't much different from a Red House Painters song in its quiet sprawling rollick of a guitarline, driving forward with the soft introspective vocals, building towards the end to a controlled rapture. The songs are about fear/revenge and getting older (respectively) instead of a lonely New Mexico outpost, and while, previously, Early Day Miners were just as successful at evoking the listener's own memories, here they seem satisfied with just conveying theirs.
The one song where the band transcends this pigeonhole is the near title track, "All Harm," the album's darkest and most forceful track. Instead of lurking in dark shadows, it creates them with a large, looming, pounding bass and haunting choir-like vocals.
Except for Let Us Garlands Bring, Early Day Miners hasn't strayed too far from indie rock and slowcore, and this album continues where Jefferson at Rest left off in its more overt indie rock-ness. While that could be a negative, Early Day Miners do the genre so well, and this batch of songs certainly outdoes the last one.
