4 out of 5

Label: Secretly Canadian

Producer: Daniel Burton

I’m not sure why, but Early Day Miners have always carried an element of menace to them.  It could be the bleak-as-fuck album art, or just the minimalist vibe, but Burton’s other band – Ativin – fits the bill of the quiet instrumental group, whereas EDM seems to be about the death of something.  I can’t say why.  It’s just the vibe I attach to the band.

And though I own a good chunk of Early Day Miners stuff, and though I can tell you, if you play a song by them, who it is, I can’t really sing along or name a song or even tell you which album it’s on.  Until “All Harm Ends Here.”  Burton has produced both (most of) the Ativin and EDM stuff, and made some purposeful choices – Ativin gets a very clean wash, but Early had a murky sound, reverb-soaked, the guitars and drums and vocals layered and layered, making the albums feel like memories of songs seeping into one another.  So I don’t feel fully at fault for not being able to tell you what’s what – it seemed purposeful.  And as mentioned, the albums seemed to accomplish what I thought was part of the goal, giving me an overall feeling of sadness or, uh, fear, without really being able to say way.  They evoked whole moods.  Pretty good stuff.  But mostly background music.

All Harm was/is the first Early Day album that really grabbed me, slowed me down, had me feeling out each track.  Burton still doesn’t want you to directly listen, per se, as his vocals are still drenched in echoes, but it’s like he suddenly got comfortable with admitting that EDM was a band, as the production was cleaned up, not relying on bursts of distortion to shock you and narrowing a lot of track times down to only a few minutes.  There’s a narrative at work here that I didn’t catch earlier, and it lifts you up and brings you down beautifully.  It is, in fact, such a sweeping trip that there’s a perhaps inevitable letdown when the big “climax” hits at track 7, leaving us with some minor pluckings for the last couple tracks that just seem like filler so that there’s a proper conclusion to the story.  I still wouldn’t say that Burton knocks this out of the park, but I don’t think that was ever the idea.