With any number of heartfelt and vaguely anthemic indie rock bands helping to see out the first decade of the 21st century in America, it's less of an issue to find an epochal band among them and more of one to find a band that is consistently a pleasure to listen to in its own right. Well into a decade's worth of performances and recording,
Early Day Miners manage that feat again on their sixth album,
The Treatment, thanks to a sense of everything from classic '60s pop to an ear for keyboards that shade without adding pomp to a burst of post-punk guitar atmospherics that emerges in the oddest places, like the crisp and then queasy riffs on "So Slowly." It's also noteworthy that the most prominent element of the songs might not be the singing (polite, hazy, never strained) but the rhythm section, a surprisingly supple and subtle unit, as readily heard on the crisp taps and tension of "The Surface of Things" and the hand-percussion lead of "How to Fall." Meanwhile, the full-on smoky funk of "The Zip" is a delight, pure late-'60s ominous club scene turned into a fragile, strange portrayal of a state of mind. ~ Ned Raggett