Eleventh Dream Day, Stalled Parade (Thrill Jockey) 9+
Few bands have turned out a more consistently inspired body of work over the past 15 years than Eleventh Dream Day, who started in the early '80s in (where else?) Louisville, and then relocated to (where else?) Chicago. Their music-from the lo-fi recordings that culminate in the aptly titled Prairie School Freakout album (1987), to the brilliant trio of albums they recorded in the early '90s for Atlantic (Beet, Lived to Tell, El Moodio), to the more recent Ursa Major (1994) and Eighth (1997)-is centered on the hard, lean guitar (and equally hard, lean voice) of Rick Rizzo, who rampaged through most of those records like an unholy cross between Neil Young at his wildest and Television-era Tom Verlaine.
On Eighth, though, the band began to change in intriguing ways, and Stalled Parade shows further evidence of this. The intervals between Eleventh Dream Day records had widened in the '90s as the band's other original members became increasingly involved in various projects: Doug McCombs (bass) co-founded Tortoise, as well as pursuing his own Brokeback project, while Janet Beveridge Bean (drums) revived Freakwater, the country-folk band she'd formed years earlier with her longtime Louisville pal Catherine Irwin.
But they've always come back to Eleventh Dream Day, and when they do they bring different experiences to complement Rizzo's developing songcraft. Take the title track of Stalled Parade: in earlier times they would have stormed through it; now it proceeds at a more measured pace, though no less inexorably. Bean sings a counterpoint vocal to Rizzo's, holding the last note of each line so her voice modulates into a drone that intensifies the wall of sound kicked up by the guitars. The slower tempo also accentuates the unusual timbre of Rizzo's voice (he recalls Robert Forster more than anyone).
The presence of Tortoise's John McEntire-he's virtually a fourth member now, contributing keyboards and percussion as well as recording and mixing the band in his own studio-has also contributed to this evolution. The eerie creaks that break through the acoustic backing to "Valrico74" (one of Bean's two lead vocals here, a mournful ballad worthy of Neil Young at his darkest) sound like his handiwork; he probably deserves some of the credit, too, for this record's sheer sonic presence.
The guitars still buzz and howl, and Rizzo still lets rip on occasion-when communicating the Edward Hopper-ish visions of "Way Too Early on a Sunday Morning," for example-but they're a more subtle and flexible band these days, and as good as they ever were.
Note: Thrill Jockey will release a compilation of early Eleventh Dream Day recordings, including all of Prairie School Freakout, in 2001.
-- Steve Connell
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