Early Day Miners - Short films from the underground

Early Day Miners came together in the late 90s in Bloomington, Indiana, as an offshoot of Ativin, a band that, since the middle of that decade, had already forged a singular combination of the feverish noise structures of Shellac and the many facets of post-rock inherited from the Louisville scene, from Rodan to Rachel's.

It's guitarist Daniel Burton and drummer Rory Leitch — who would later leave both bands — who gave birth to what, from the very start, was conceived as a parallel project rather than an alternative to their original group; indeed, not only did Ativin carry on with their activity (“Night Mute”, their most recent album at the time, dates from 2004), but Burton himself has stated that his simultaneous commitment to two bands stemmed from the need to develop, in different artistic contexts, various facets of his restless musical creativity. So while Ativin kept to an approach mainly devoted to noise-driven deconstruction, still centered on guitars, Early Day Miners distinguished themselves from the outset through a careful pursuit of elaborate sonorities that, while stemming from a not-too-dissimilar background, favor delicate, enveloping textures with a pronounced cinematic quality — not without rough edges capable of immediate emotional impact, yet more easily likened to dreamlike post-rock constructions than to the cerebral legacy of their noise past.

A splendid demonstration of the band's musical coordinates can already be found in their debut work, Placer Found, an album released in 2000 after a full two years in the making, which, right from its bleak, bare-bones artwork (a black-and-white image of a lone farmhouse shot from a distance), reveals — even on a formal level — the evolution that Early Day Miners represented within the artistic journey of Daniel Burton, the true engine and guiding mind of the band.

The seven tracks that make up Placer Found move through soundscapes with deliberately blurred edges, shaped by an intimate mood that unfolds in gently-drawn compositions with slowly measured rhythms, pointing to the electric trails of Codeine and the muffled melancholy of Red House Painters as the band's main artistic touchstones. But Placer Found holds much more than that: slowed-down weaves with softened edges, over which Burton's voice, hushed and at times barely whispered (“East Berlin At Night”, “Stanwix”), hints at melodies with intimate contours (“Placer Found”); expansive, enveloping atmospheres, in the vein of Talk Talk or Labradford, serving as a backdrop to atmospheric scene-painting (the falling snow of “East Berlin At Night”, the ocean and landscapes of “Texas Cinema”), from which only occasionally emerges the tempered sturdiness of guitars building to almost imperceptible crescendos, or slow explosions with a fleeting post-rock flavor, as happens in the closing moments of “Texas Cinema” and, above all, in the long electric twist of “Desert Cantos”.

If one really had to place the debut of Early Day Miners within an artistic current or pin a label on it, slowcore might be the most fitting one, since Placer Found, while starting from a basic framework not far removed from that of Codeine and Low, enriches their proposition not merely by borrowing its structure, but also by adding a distinctive sensibility — one geared as much toward reclaiming more traditional forms (the singer-songwriter intimacy of many of the tracks and the folk delicacy of the long instrumental “In These Hills”) as toward developing dreamlike, remarkably weightless components, even in the work's relatively few harsher passages.

The band's cinematic sensibility, blatantly evident across almost every track of their debut album, soon finds an outlet in a fully-fledged soundtrack, developed together with Unwed Sailor for Stateless, a short film by Chris Bennett, the director and photographer who had already been responsible for the artwork imagery of Placer Found. The five tracks of Stateless — only one of which is sung and built around clearly defined rhythmic structures — confirm all the suggestions of the debut album, if anything sharpening its most abstract and descriptive qualities, at once unsettling and ethereal, in their role as the unchanging accompaniment to the images contained on the CD.

Stateless, however, is just a brief interlude, since in parallel Early Day Miners were putting together the true follow-up to Placer Found, which also marked their move to fellow Bloomington label Secretly Canadian, who would go on to release all their subsequent work. Let Us Garlands Bring is a record that rivals its predecessor for evocative power and emotional intensity, giving shape and definition to that fascinating but still elusive sound of the debut album. For a start, the band expanded for this record to include Molly Kien's cello and Maggie Polk's violin, whose presence lends gentle grace to the arrangements of several of the eight tracks that make up a good hour of music, in which the band revisits and develops what had already been so well expressed on Placer Found. The melodies remain soft, the sound grows even more cohesive, while the guitars trace out the contours of increasingly well-defined "songs", still guided by Burton's sweet murmur and often embellished by strings, as on the opening "Centralia", the exquisitely delicate "Light In August" and the seventeen minutes of closer "A Common Wealth", forever poised between spectral atmospheres and dreamlike fascinations that even bring to mind the sinuous harmonic embraces of Slowdive or the more mysterious ones of Sigur Rós.

Early Day Miners' cinematic soul blends here perfectly with their taste for more conventionally "rock" instrumental work, giving rise both to fine harmonic interplay that, thanks to the strings, flirts with a modern, Rachel's-style orchestral quality ("Autumn Wake"), and to proper songs, skeletal and linear as in the case of "Silvergate" — where the underlying ambient expanse turns into distant distortion over which the voices build graceful melodies — or marked by pronounced electric complexity, as on "Santa Carolina" and "Offshore". It's above all on tracks like these that Early Day Miners skilfully alternate the different moods of their music, not simply juxtaposing them according to some predictable script, but chasing deep emotional currents that find their perfect consecration in the eight minutes, dense with dramatic nostalgia, of "Offshore", a track introduced by the sound of harmonica and pervaded by a gradual layering of guitars, which then erupt in the stormy sea of "white heat and mystery" and in the noisy whirlwind of an anguished, potentially endless finale that simply leaves you breathless.

It was no easy task to follow up a debut of such high quality, already so rich in ideas, but with Let Us Garlands Bring Daniel Burton's band manage to actually improve on it, adding pathos and a throbbing heart to the dreamy slowness of their music, and delivering passages of extraordinary intensity that alone would be enough to sum up the essence and meaning of an entire artistic journey.

The tendency to recast the sprawling landscapes of the debut in a solidly electric form becomes even more pronounced on the following Jefferson At Rest, which, released just a few months after Let Us Garlands Bring, is the band's most straightforwardly "rock" record, its ethereal imprint here often translating into imposing walls of guitar and lean instrumental textures, always accomplished but generally lacking the passion that made Let Us Garlands Bring an unrepeatable album. There's no shortage here either of soft ballads, like "New Holland", in which Erin Houchin's delicate voice converses with Burton's, or "Jefferson", an imagined interview with the historic US president Thomas Jefferson, built on complex instrumental interplay, now quiet, now turbulent, but always kept under tight control. Compared to the previous two albums, Jefferson At Rest loses a little in immediacy and spontaneity what it gains in deft compositional craft: the guitars decidedly take over, their crescendos, now rather more energetic, becoming the fulcrum of a record with a relatively "classic" structure, its robust impact only barely tempered by a seductive underlying nostalgia. Consequently, the dreamier components of the Early Day Miners sound feature less here, embodied almost solely by Maggie Polk's violin on "McCalla" and by the ethereal slowness of the gorgeous closer "Cotillion".

The band's period of intense recording activity (two albums and an EP in the space of little more than a year) then continued in a direction almost entirely opposite to that of Jefferson At Rest, with the six tracks released for the EP series on Spanish label Acuarela Discos. The Sonograph Ep in fact packs barely half an hour of music with an intangible quality, split evenly between soft ballads and catatonic instrumentals that, even when they set off with heftier guitar sounds, as on closer "Misrach", end up in almost ambient-like expanses. Once again, though, the band shows greater ease with the slender melodies of tracks steeped in velvety nostalgia, such as "Albatross" and "Bedroom, Houston", and in the sprawling acoustic touches of the muffled "Perish Room".

After a two-year gap in releases, coinciding with a long tour and the recording comeback of Ativin, the following All Harm Ends Here tends to recall the suggestions of debut Placer Found rather than the rawer, more direct feel of Jefferson At Rest, even if its opening track ("Errance") seems designed precisely to immediately confirm the group's now-familiar imprint while at the same time catching the listener off guard, condensing all the facets of Burton's inventive songwriting. The track makes a striking impact, built from the interplay of guitar tension and sharp rhythmic cadences, which soon dissolves into the flow of a gentle, romantic ballad, only to alternate between these moods again over its (mere) four and a half minutes, before closing in a crescendo with the same tension with which it opened.

This compositional complexity, combined with the constant back-and-forth of emotions, perfectly captures feelings of sweet melancholy, through which — alternately or simultaneously — claustrophobic tension and the serene disorientation of wide-open spaces both come through, desolate black-and-white landscapes and watercolours in muted tones come into view, and a deep human warmth as well as the surge of a troubled soul can both be felt. In reconciling these opposites, Early Day Miners show their inspiration remains undimmed in the compositions where the shadowy character of their music is most pronounced, as demonstrated by the hypnotic melancholy of "The Purest Red" or the placid romanticism of the slow-burning "The Way We Live Now", which manages to channel into fully realised song form suggestions echoing the finest contemporary classical production.

There's no shortage here, though, of more "driven" moments either, such as the tight guitar charges of "Precious Blood" and, above all, "All Harm", a track of high tension and dramatic momentum. But even on these tracks, the Slint-like echoes are revisited in slow motion and softened by a lyrical streak that's never entirely absent, the true common thread of a sound that favours a steady pace over the "stop-start" approach typical of so many less inspired Slint imitators.

Burton's ever-meticulous songwriting then goes on to reveal an original, auteur-ish "pop" sensibility, equally capable of shining through in the sunniness of "Comfort/Guilt" and in the subdued chiaroscuro of "The Union Trade", which, together with the splendid melancholy of "Townes", perfectly reflects the essence of the band's sound, showing their uncommon ability to transcend categories and definitions, blending in balanced fashion a recovery of tradition with the exploration of more experimental solutions.

A little over a year after All Harm Ends Here, Burton and co. run the ideal time machine of their music backwards, revisiting on Offshore tracks originally written in 2001 and included on Let Us Garlands Bring.

Right from the record's opening gambit, the nine minutes of "Land Of Pale Saints", a pronounced noise-rock drive is again evident, caught between a massive cascade of booming guitars and a nervous, relentless rhythm section, which only in the track's central section begins to thin out, while still maintaining a claustrophobic tension that finds no release in a predictable explosion, folding back instead on itself in an ethereal trait d'union with the sinister electric-folk ballad "Deserter". The album's unified trajectory continues without a break into "Sans Revival", in which Burton's fondness for 90s wave sounds, tied above all to the Creation and 4AD labels, clearly emerges, dissolving copious guitar feedback into subtly psychedelic abstractions.

The record's true raison d'être, however, lies entirely in the "Return Of The Native"-"Silent Tents" sequence, which reworks, across two separate tracks, the two movements of the wonderful "Offshore" (indeed…) from Let Us Garlands Bring: of that track, "Return Of The Native" reproduces the sung section, here entrusted to the silky but somewhat too polished voice of Amber Webber (Black Mountain), while "Silent Tents" constitutes the emotional crescendo, now muted into an extreme expanse, not without its own charm but lacking the intensity of the original, perhaps also due to the production and mixing, handled, as for the whole album, by John McEntire. The same goes for closer "Hymn Beneath The Palisades", which once again revisits "Offshore" in unified form, this time purely instrumental, preserving its spasms and post-rock crescendo, albeit muffled and smoothed over, elegantly rendered with a precision that ultimately ends up dulling its original spontaneity.

Offshore, more than a proper album, feels like an exercise in style, certainly faithful to the evolution the band's sound had undergone in the meantime — having abandoned their original post-rock leanings, they were by now set on pursuing an abstract, conceptually ambient musical form, one they remain faithful to even when the harmonic structures of the tracks seem to pull in the opposite direction. But then again, reconciling form and substance, tradition and innovation, is one of the central aims underpinning Early Day Miners' music, one they manage to achieve even when, as in this case, it's precisely the superb quality of the old compositions that ends up highlighting the lesser impact achieved on a formal level by the gradual transformation of an artistic expression that remains, nonetheless, endlessly compelling.

The three years that separate this record from the following The Treatment mark a far deeper divide in Early Day Miners' artistic history than the mere passing of time alone could have caused.

This can be gleaned from a multitude of elements, both substantial and superficial: the latter alone are sufficiently telling, starting with the way the band presents itself, now making a habit of being photographed dressed to the nines: it's a bit as if miners had traded their flannel shirts for smart suits, and swapped scruffy beards and unkempt hair for a neater look.

The aesthetic is a faithful metaphor for the changes in the band's style and very structure, which now, alongside frontman Dan Burton and bassist Johnny Richardson, introduces newcomers second guitarist John Dawson and drummer Marty Sprowls, rounding out a lineup trimmed down to a quartet and now engaged in writing explicit, direct songs.

With its sunny, lively pop-rock, The Treatment represents a genuine shift in register, embodied by the dissolving of slow passages and stirring electric swirls into languid, nervy guitars and liquid keyboards, underscoring immediately impactful melodies and vocals rendered ethereal by the frequent interplay between Burton's voice and Amber Webber's.

The band's usual nostalgic brushstrokes now meet a lighter pop spirit and the brisk pace of clattering guitars and insistent basslines; from a production standpoint, however, the transition seems only half complete, since the excessive emphasis on dull, monotone rhythms and dominant keyboards ends up significantly weakening the evocative elements still present in Early Day Miners' music. The band is still capable of delivering enjoyable ballads, but it now seems to have moved on from dense atmospheric sensations to the sun-baked warmth of American freeways, flying by beneath the wheels, on the wings of guitars and keyboards with rhythms tighter than ever before.

On Night People, the shortened moniker (EDM) doesn't really shift Burton and co.'s course compared to the last two albums: thick electric lines, nervy rhythms, enveloping psych twists and an by-now well-established rock attitude all run through the grooves of the eight tracks on "Night People". That's the case with the insistent pulses driving the not-entirely-successful "Video/Stereo", the drum-heavy insistence of "Temple Bar", the almost tribal cadences of the closing "Open Bar", but also the excellent desert-"highway" ballad "Terrestrial Rooms".

A few traces of the past surface here and there over the course of the album, starting with the fluid melodic sensibility found in the opening "Hold Me Down", moving on to "Milking The Moon", a long, dreamy instrumental. Nostalgia then shows itself quite unabashedly above all in the reinterpretation of "How To Fall" (already a "radio" track for The Treatment), wrapped in an old, briny haze that makes it one of the few recent Early Day Miners songs able to come close to the glories of their past.

Granted, the days of Placer Found and Let Us Garlands Bring are long gone, yet "Night People" demonstrates, if nothing else, Daniel Burton's band's willingness to put itself back in play, to start a new chapter that aims to blend a contemporary sensibility, old roots and that particular knack for songwriting and atmospheric soundscapes that has always been their most appreciable trait.

The goal is ambitious and there's still a long way to go to achieve it, but the band's rediscovered vitality already deserves to be greeted with optimism: welcome back, EDM!

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