EARLY DAY MINERS - All Harm Ends Here

With "All Harm Ends Here", the band led by Daniel Burton, a parallel project to Ativin, reaches its fourth full-length and offers further confirmation of a sound that evolves slowly, while now displaying distinctive traits of its own within that boundless and disorienting territory spanning indie-rock accents, "post" experimentation and the American singer-songwriter tradition.

As Burton himself stated during last year's Italian tour, Early Day Miners represent an ideal "place" for exploring fascinating territories, where sonic paths can be traced that are clearly distinct from the noisier ones that characterize above all the more recent Ativin output. "All Harm Ends Here" indeed reaffirms the band's eccentric parallel status (now a quintet enriched by a string section) with respect to its members' other projects, across nine tracks suspended between muted, melancholy tones, a cinematic dimension and controlled guitar crescendos.

On listening, the record recalls the suggestions of the debut "Placer Found" more than the slightly rougher, more direct fabric of the previous "Jefferson At Rest", even though its opening approach ("Errance") seems designed to achieve the double effect of immediately confirming the band's already distinctive imprint while at the same time wrong-footing the listener, encapsulating every facet of Burton's inspired songwriting. The track indeed has a striking impact, built on the interplay between 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 the course of its (mere) four and a half minutes, before closing in a crescendo with the same tension with which it opened.

This complexity of tones, combined with the constant emotional back-and-forth found in all of Early Day Miners' other work, evokes a range of wildly different reference points — from Codeine to Red House Painters, from Talk Talk to Low — making it almost impossible to avoid oxymorons when describing their music, not because it's full of contradictions, but precisely because the band's skill and sensitivity manage to unify seemingly irreconcilable elements, building bridges between different styles and shifting moods. Thus, the intense episodes on "All Harm Ends Here" convey a sense of sweet, dreamlike melancholy, of a multicoloured greyness, of a dazzling half-light. Running through them — alternately or together — are claustrophobic tension and the serene disorientation of wide open spaces; one glimpses desolate black-and-white landscapes and watercolours in muted hues, and senses both a deep human warmth and the surge of a troubled soul.

In reconciling these opposites, Early Day Miners undoubtedly do their best work — showing their most creative side — on the compositions where the intimate, shadowy character of their music is most pronounced. It's a pleasure to lose oneself in the hypnotic melancholy of "The Purest Red", or to be carried along by the placid romanticism of the slow, captivating "The Way We Live Now", which, built on the dialogue between strings and guitar, channels into a fully-formed song echoes reminiscent of the finest contemporary classical production.

There's no shortage, though, of more driving episodes in which the experience of Ativin resurfaces like an underground stream. Such is the case with the instrumental "Precious Blood", which, after a stretched-out opening, unfolds into a tight guitar gallop, and above all with "All Harm", a track of high tension and dramatic momentum. But even in these tracks, the Slint-like echoes are revisited in slow motion and softened by a lyrical attitude that's never entirely absent, the true common thread of a cohesive, uniform sound that favours a steady gait over the "jerky" one typical of so many less inspired Slint epigones.

Elsewhere, Burton's ever-meticulous songwriting reveals an original, auteur-like "pop" sensibility, equally able to express itself in the sunlit tones of "Comfort/Guilt" and in the hushed, beguiling chiaroscuro of "The Union Trade", whose fine, carefully crafted instrumental arrangement — like that of the melancholy, suspended "Townes" (the best track here, alongside the aforementioned "The Way We Live Now") — perfectly mirrors the essence of the band's current sound and can rightly be considered the ideal summa of the whole album.

Overall, the record still comes across as a single continuous flow, in which the very sequencing of the tracks seems carefully devised to lead the listener through soundscapes whose tones, vivid at first, gradually fade over the course of the tracks, until reaching a dark, impalpable final calm. "All Harm Ends Here" may not add a great deal to the music Early Day Miners have produced so far, but it confirms unaltered the charm expressed above all on their first two records, and their uncommon ability to transcend categories and definitions, manifested in the way they recontextualize their original "indie" sensibility, both in drawing on tradition and in exploring more experimental solutions.

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30/04/2026