Early Day Miners
Secretly Canadian Records
Indiana's Early Day Miners don't have quite the bleak, dusty, oppressed sound you might expect from their name. Rather, the group's warm, intricately textured compositions evoke feelings of open space, coupled with a prevailing sense of slightly melancholy resignation. Songs unfold luxuriously, even languidly, into simple but rich tapestries of sound, woven through with the gold and silver threads of intertwining guitars. There aren't any explicit folk or countryisms but this does feel like a rural music, a Midwestern or Southwestern music, a music of the plains and the desert. There aren't any overt rockisms here either. The music just is -- warm, calm, unvarnished, as simple and lovely as the stretch of sky and land to the horizon's hinge. Hushed, breathy vocals appear only occasionally, like soon-to-be ghost towns in the vast unpopulated spaces of the music.
According to principal member Daniel Burton, the name Early Day Miners actually comes from a tourist pamphlet for Silver Gate, Montana, a small town near Yellowstone National Park. Burton has also said that the band's style is largely inspired by visual images, especially film, photography, and travel memories, which makes perfect sense when you hear EDM's stately sweeps of sound. Burton started the project with Rory Leitch while both were still members of Ativin, in the months before that group's demise. Early Day Miners first released the seven-song album, the lovely 49-minute, Placer Found, which came out in 2000 on Western Vinyl. Then in 2002, they released the equally as beautiful and very measured Let Us Garlands Bring on Secretly Canadian.
Jesse Ashlock
last updated:
07/02/02
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