Fast 'n' Bulbous Classics: 1988
Eleventh Dream Day, Prairie School Freakout (Thrill Jockey/Amoeba, 1988) 10-
The mid-80s were unsatisfying times for rockers. Aside from the handful of seminal releases from The Replacements, Naked Raygun and the post-hardcore stable at SST, pickings were slim. By 1985 the formerly great X and The Dream Syndicate had devolved into merely serviceable roots rock, along with The Blasters, Rank & File, Del Fuegos, Green On Red, True West, Long Ryders and True Believers. The solution began blooming in Lexington, Ky. in 1983, when Rick Rizzo scooped up Janet Beveridge Bean after the dissolution of his punk band The Pods and relocated to Chicago. Picking up Doug McCombs and second guitarist Baird Figi, Eleventh Dream Day were a road-hardened band by 1987, eager to blow away their unsatisfying debut EP with a document of their live fire, an update of Zuma-era Crazy Horse topped with Rizzo and Bean’s frantic John Doe-Exene Cervenka harmonies. And the main attraction, Rizzo and Figi’s twin guitar interplay reminiscent of Television’s Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd, had they brawled drunkenly like they were always itching to do. Recorded late at night in one take in a tiny Louisville studio in sweltering heat with a malfunctioning amp, the result was an intense, buzzing masterpiece of American guitar rock, Prairie School Freakout.
”Watching The Candles Burn” explodes out of the box like an angry, grizzled dog, its driving momentum knocking contemporaries like Thin White Rope aside like rag dolls. “Sweet Smell” doesn’t let up, Bean’s wailing chorus adding eerie menace, the lyrics referencing Neil Young’s “Ambulence Blues.” The drums sound like Bean’s using John Bonham’s coffin as a kettle drum, and the guitars play fast and loose. “Coercion” is even better, with one of the album’s catchiest, memorable guitar hooks, and Bean’s poetic, haunting lyrics, ending with the strangled words, “she became the night.” Figi’s “Driving Song” and Bean’s “The Death of Albert C. Samson” are more traditionally blues-based, with stellar slide playing on the former, the latter a savagely rocking, breathlessly gripping tale of a serial killer. At the heart of the album lie two songs that, fifteen years later are still the highlights of Eleventh Dream Day’s live shows. “Tarantula” and “Among The Pines” are both classics that combine Dylan-ish surreal imagery with truly inspired guitar wankery while perfecting the noir-roots vibe that The Gun Club had lost track of. Along with Dinosaur Jr. and, in their own way Sonic Youth, Eleventh Dream Day rescued guitar heroics at a time when everyone else was afraid or embarrassed to go nuts on the fret. Less cock rock than tastefully expressionist outpourings of emotion, the solos define the melancholy, autumnal feel of the album (“A cold fall rain/a distant vague pain/a long black train).” Like the twin-guitar solos on “Marquee Moon,” I’ll never get sick of ‘em.
After the peak, the album offers more blazing fun with McCombs’ frenzied meditation on drowning in “Through My Mouth,” the country charm of “Beach Miner” and “Life On A String,” a gentle break-up song that builds into sandblasting agony as the woman who broke Rizzo’s heart changes her mind and asks him to come back and he repeatedly wails “No I can’t come back.” The lovingly re-mastered Thrill Jockey reissue adds the Wayne EP, which includes tracks from the same session, the 11:19 “Tenth Leaving Train,” EDD’s own “Marquee Moon” and their steamrolling cover of Young’s “Southern Pacific.” “Go” was recorded later, a preview of the cleaner, tighter direction they would take in their Atlantic period. The band has since evolved and remained great . . . but they've never recorded anything that surpassed the beautifully damaged, smoking fury of Prairie School Freakout.
