aaamusic | On 16, Feb 2011

ELEVENTH DREAM DAY

Riot Now!

21 March 2011 (CD/LP)

When one thinks about rock music, there are several words that come to mind:  sex, drugs, youth, punk and for many years, male.  The “manliness” of rock seems to have been solidly debunked. Is “youth” on the brink? The last few years have seen a surge of critical and commercial success of bands from the ’90s, or otherwise middle-aged artists.  Superchunk, Slint, Come, Gories and many others have reunited to find themselves more popular then they were back in the day.  Sonic Youth, Tortoise, Yo La Tengo, and the Flaming Lips are some of the most successful artists from the indie community.  It is true that critics and audiences alike embrace new artists with mind bending rapidity thanks to blogs, social networks, and video technology.  The same audience seems equally fast to reward and embrace artists whose careers began before those championing their virtues were born.

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 (Freakwater), Douglas McCombs (Tortoise, Brokeback) and Mark Greenberg (The Coctails) revel in their own mixture of melodic mayhem. The band, while always moderately active in Chicago have not released a record since 2006.

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.