The first thing you notice about The Treatment, the sixth album from Bloomington, Indiana's Early Day Miners, is the relative lack of sonic cobwebs-- a bit unexpected from a band with a reputation for being shoegaze and slowcore revivalists. The percussion here is crisp, the tempos insistent-- even peppy at times-- and the guitar is slightly hazy but hardly dreamy. "In the Fire" and the Madchester echo of "How to Fall" are a far cry from musical wallpaper, and the band rarely embraces atmosphere for atmosphere's sake.
The second thing you notice is that, for a band's sixth album (more, if you include Daniel Burton's parallel work in the instrumental Ativin), the disc doesn't sound like the latest endpoint in a gradual evolution as much as a new beginning, and this fresh-start theory makes some sense. The Treatment introduces Early Day Miners' latest lineup change, and with it has come a conscious shift in direction. Gone are the open-ended moodscapes and reverb excursions, making room for a newfound economy and an ear for greater accessibility.
The Treatment's various studio effects are sympathetic to the songs rather than an end unto themselves. Daun Fields' backing vocals constitute perhaps the best effect of all. At the same time, the group doesn't always have a clear destination in mind. "The Surface of Things" and "Spaces" start off so cool, it's disappointing how static the tracks remain. What's missing is the kind of payoff songs like "So Slowly" or (the admittedly long and dreamy) "Becloud", to name two highlights, deserve. They glide along on cool basslines or swing with the weight of epic import, but fail to build up any melodic or emotional inertia to lend them greater force.
That's not a real problem when crafting post-rock amorphousness or gauzy soundscapes are the tasks at hand; in those cases, lack of impact is partly the point. Here, however, Early Day Miners may have erred too strongly on the side of concision, overcompensating for past indulgence with a radical shift toward ec [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| onomy at the expense of edge and impact. It's rarely boring, and often full of promise, but it's a direction that calls for further tweaks, experiments, and exploration to get the balance just right.
