Early Day Miners

If any indie band could be reconstituted with a properly calibrated mix of the mood, pop and rock quarks, Early Day Miners would require practically a whole shaker of mood, seasoned with a sprinkle of pop and but a dash of rock. Like the paintings of Winslow Homer, their watercolor soundscapes have a gentle, translucent quality that does nothing to obscure the broad, lingering swaths of color and form, illuminated in softly simmering arrangements and loose emotional brush strokes. At times, Daniel Burton’s mournful baritone recalls Mark Kozelek, but there’s more sonic push and dynamism in one song off the band’s new album, All Harm Ends Here, than on an entire Red House Painters record. However, if far plusher than some of the desolate electric folk of early sadcore, this definitely features the same laconic, reflective tone that echoes early American landscape artists in conveying both a sense of grandeur and an equally pervasive feeling of dissolution.