Every so often, a band perfectly encapsulates the natural environment in which they're based. Central Indiana, like central Illinois, central Iowa, and many other Midwestern centrals, is carpeted with a waist-high forest of corn and soybeans, stretched out on ironed-flat topography. Flying over the region you can see all the farms drawn out into perfect, rigidly shaped dimensions; driving down I-74 the sky sometimes drapes around, radiant blue on all sides.
Early Day Miners show a talent on their third full-length, Jefferson at Rest, for tapping into that corn-belt uniformity some call tranquil and others call bland. With arrangements confused about where sparse ends and dull begins, most of these seven songs tread water like they're taking a summer camp swim test. Sounding worshipful, at times, of milk-carton kid Mark Kozelek and the stormin' Mormons of Low, Early Day Miners rarely exhibit the nuanced dynamics that allow their idols to produce more than mere sedative sonics.
After the promising, rich-toned opener "Wheeling", Jefferson sinks into a mellower mood, as the Miners try their hand at spinning sepia-toned country portraits. Unfortunately, they can't help but sound like a second-wave emo band trying to go pastoral, American Football-style twin guitar weaving beneath grocery list lyrics of cookie-cutter antique imagery: factory work lights, homesteads, transistor radios, quarry swimming pools. Left to fend for themselves with little creative context, such words lend the songs all the down-home authenticity of a Cracker Barrel.
In the throat of a stronger vocalist, this effect may have been tempered, but band maestro Dan Burton's voice has about as much scenic variation as his home state. The band whips up a fair amount of texture on some tunes-- "McCalla" is borderline creepy and taut like "King of Pain"-era Police; the title track is filled out with evening-drone keyboards-- but even these starve to death in dire need of a crescendo or two. By the time the album closes out with a limp on "Cotillion", Early Day Miners sound like they're running out of batteries.
Indiana fancies itself the Crossroads of America, presumably because of its central location both geographically and, er, culturally, but I've always personally interpreted the slogan to mean it's the kind of state you only pass through on the way to somewhere else. Jefferson at Rest projects the same sense of disposability, and while Secretly Canadian, with a solid stable of Great Plains poets like Jason Molina and June Panic, is doing a bang-up job of providing regional mystique for us Midwesterners jealous of that cred-loaded South, this release doesn't help the good cause much. Like Indiana itself, Jefferson at Rest might be comforting to a few, but it'll be flyover country to many more.
