Thrill Jockey‘s website as usual says it all better than anyone else, well you would wouldn’t you if you had as many great bands on your label as they do, Eleventh Dream Day being one of the longest serving on their roster.
Riot Now!, Eleventh Dream Day’s 10th album, is a call back to the urgency of 1988’s Prairie School Freakout, with a string of mostly first takes tracked in one session with few overdubs. Rick Rizzo, Janet Beveridge Bean, Douglas McCombs and Mark Greenberg revel in their own mixture of melodic mayhem. The band, while always moderately active in Chicago have not released a record since 2006. Their 2011 album cover depicts a check out line in a grocery store. A customer stands glibly in line wearing a shirt that says “Riot Now!” Overhead a security camera films, and customers move about with blank expressions. The cover and many of the songs are comments on the contradictions inherit in a desire for large scale social change while retaining all the creature comforts of prosperity.
Eleventh Dream Day are a band who make music because they are compelled to. Their motivation is as pure as it was when they began. They have something to say and they need to say it. The band are true to the ethos of the punk rock that inspired them. There can be no more perfect final nail in the coffin of those who still believe rock is the exclusive domain of youth.
So, you have been told. Stop complaining and get off your arses and do something, anything…like get on over to Comet Club and catch one of the truly great alt-rock bands who were making records when you were still in nappies.
