It works for tomorrow: A baker’s dozen from Eleventh Dream Day

“Eleventh Dream Day’s first show was in the year of Orwell, and perhaps they should have taken that as some kind of sign.” The ad copy for the re-release of the band’s full-length debut lays down the band’s dynamic in a line, that winking “perhaps” retrospectively finding an untraveled road but knowing it would never have been taken anyway. Thrown up against the ominous and the oppressive, Eleventh Dream Day saw the portents and pushed forward regardless. 

The crux of the band — Janet Beveridge Bean on drums, Douglas McCombs on bass and Rick Rizzo on guitar, Rizzo and Bean both singing — has played together for four decades now, making a base out of Chicago and a bulwark out of their no-bullshit Midwestern rock. They’ve always been right for the times even if the times have not been kind to them, and I’ve been coming back to their music more and more lately. The anger and clarity, the confusion and fear, the understanding that understanding will only take you so far and a wordless wrenching guitar will have to carry you the rest of the way. 

“There’s something sad about America,” Rizzo and Bean sang all the way back in 2011. “The x-ray showed the break, it wasn’t the first mistake / If you don’t try to tell it straight, the point will come too late.” Well, the point has come. These are bad times, but if Eleventh Dream Day’s music is not a guide through them it is a companion, comforting and prodding and letting loose. They’ve known the score for a long time and it’s late in the game, but that hasn’t stopped them from playing. Here are some songs I’m carrying with me as I try to push forward, maybe they will give you something to hold onto as well.

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“If looks could kill, here’s looking at you”

“Watching The Candles Burn” opens that full-length debut from 1988, the wonderfully and aptly named Prairie School Freakout, and it wastes no time establishing the band’s sound. Twisty and jagged guitars, courtesy of Rizzo and Baird Figi, and a supple yet driving rhythm section soundtrack noirish menace. “I ain’t got no matches, and what if I did? I was home all night, sick in bed,” Rizzo scornfully declaims, daring the listener to say otherwise. A song to watch more than candles burn by.

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“You’re not gonna have to save a place for me”

2015’s Works For Tomorrow is one of the band’s fiercest albums, and as the title indicates the band has the future and its foreclosing on their minds. But they also have the piss and vinegar to kick out the jams in “Go Tell It,” a throwback to their earlier days of terse poetic doom and savage solos and ferocious riffs ridden as far as they can go, even if that winds up being under a train. Like a train could stop Bean’s hollers at the end.

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“On your knees you never beg, but you just get used to being closer to the ground” 

Bean can wail and snarl and harmonize but also has a quieter mode, a tone that could be a coo if you weren’t paying attention to the lyrics. The 1994 release Ursa Major marked the end of the band as a full-time endeavor (more on this later) and is their first shift into significantly quieter territory, but that doesn’t make it less intense. “Exit Right” limns the contours of a dangerous relationship but Bean’s even tone delineates submission on a larger scale, a giving in that cuts deeper than giving up, and if the guitars are not as wild as before their precision feels like a curse.

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“Count your blessings, come up dry”

On the other hand, fuck that person who fucked you over. Fuck em! “Lately I’ve Been Thinking” is a title and a chorus with a great kicker — “about NOTHING” — off 2006’s Zeroes and Ones, a Mobius strip of rage at someone causing you pain and the concurrent torment of being unable to let go of that pain. Did the band invent doomscrolling two decades ago? If they did, they also invented the solution of thrashing your way through it, spitting bile all the while. As a singer Rizzo is fairly limited, as a guy using rhythm and tone to turn words into shivs he can make David Mamet sound like Rod McKuen.

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“He sure was a bad shot”

After some indie hype, Eleventh Dream Day had a disastrous stint on Atlantic Records in the early 90s, culminating with an entire album — 1993’s El Moodio — essentially being lost due to intra-label confusion. The band released an alternate version of the album a few decades later with a few additional tracks, including “Sunflower,” an absolute barnburner (literally, if I’m hearing the lyrics right) which starts in fifth gear, somehow stomps down on the gas even harder when guitarist Wink O’Bannon (sitting in on this one album) starts to solo and fully achieves liftoff in the last minute as Rizzo delivers the above lyric like a punchline to a joke on every fucking sucker who would stand in the way of something this gloriously intense. This is not quite the culmination of catharsis but a conflagration in the moment, no time or reason to think about anything else. Maybe you can see the appeal.

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“The world might be changing outside that door, but that’s not my world anymore”

The Atlantic predecessor to El Moodio, 1991’s Lived To Tell, slightly downplayed the guitar squall in favor of hooks but losing none of the band’s ferocity – a smart review makes the comparison to John Doe and Exene of X, album opener “Rose of Jericho” sounds like tweaked-up Tom Petty, this was ready to be a hit. Of course it went nowhere, and the bitter resignation of “It’s Not My World” is a look at another path that could’ve have been taken into a dead end. A slow lock-in, Bean’s beats hitting like empty pint glasses on the bar while she and Rizzo come together for the chorus of despair. As a guitarist, Rizzo has always drawn from Neil Young but his tone slashes more than it splinters, cutting the bone. It’s a song to kill a beer or two to, because the harsh truth of being left behind goes down better with a drink. But hiding in that hopelessness is the idea that while outside the door is bad, you’ll drown staying in here.

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“The waters swirl, the light comes rushing in and pours out of my open mouth”

In Sam Peckinpah’s Convoy, a bunch of truckers go on the run after beating the shit out of some racist cops at a bar and wind up becoming folk heroes, attracting motorists from all over the Southwest as they churn up the road. At one point, a journalist tries to find a deeper meaning while talking to one of those hangers-on, and the interview subject doesn’t bite:

“Sir, I wonder if I could ask you why you’re in this convoy with the Rubber Duck.”

“Well, I’m just along to kick ass and for the ride.”

“Yeah, but, well, uh, surely you must have some kind of personal grievance against the laws of this state?”

“No, I just like kickin’ ass.”

This is all to say that McCombs’ bass riff at the start of “Through My Mouth” kicks ass, and the guitars that layer on top of it before chainsawing into each other kick ass, and the whole song kicks ungodly amounts of ass. There is nothing wrong with enjoying kicking ass.

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“The smarter you get, the less it seems that anyone cares about your dreams”

“Divining For Water” is where those lines about the sadness of America come from. I hope to write more in depth about Riot Now, the album it’s from, at some point down the line – it’s a record that is in line with Octavia Butler’s Parable books, not remarkable for predicting the future but for seeing the present so clearly and looking down the road to where it will lead. Most of its songs don’t lead anywhere good but this one at least it keeps the door open. You can still care about your dreams, even if no one else does.

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“Our lives hang in the balance and we just can’t stem the tide, you’ve got to live with yourself or learn to love the ride”

Eighth is Eleventh Dream Day’s quietest album. The band is down to a trio, the hushed and anxious sound is hard to reconcile with the fury of only a few years before. You can’t dream if you don’t sleep and “Insomnia” is the soundtrack of trudging into a dead end because there is nowhere to rest, nowhere else to go. And then Rizzo’s guitar rises out of the murk like a nightmare, the unnameable still without words but put into sound. The solo is a miasma, what counts is how it resolves into that remorseless riff with Bean and McCombs’ rhythm. It’s the sound of both the coming dread and the resolve to face it down.

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“It’s too dark for apologies”

There is more than one way to stay awake, and instead of dread you can get paralyzed by furious untaken action. The band’s sophomore album Beet has fewer lengthy freakouts than their debut, but that in no way limits the frenzy of Rizzo and Figi’s guitars on “Awake I Lie.”  This is the dark pulse of insomnia, the knowledge that the world is turning to shit as you lie awake and that even if you could sleep that wouldn’t help. (Beet is in out-of-print limbo, but this live performance of “Awake I Lie” captures the sound nicely.)

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“Way too early to join the fight, not too late on a Saturday night”

It is exhausting to keep going. In 2000 Eleventh Dream Day had existed for two decades and had not been commercially viable for years. Since the mid-90s the band had been an occasional concern and titling their latest album Stalled Parade did not exactly herald a new momentum. There is a tension in “Way Too Early On A Sunday Morning,” a tension that anyone who has stayed up all night will recognize — how bleariness gives way to intensity, how momentum is where you find it as the day breaks on a subway’s way forward. There is still a little more in the tank for a brother you can’t leave behind, for a life that won’t collapse when an asshole pushes on it. Keeping on is its own effort and its own reward. If you can’t face a new day, extend the old one. 

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“I’ve got no advice to share, I know nothing anyway, the truth bends on your hopeful ears, it works for tomorrow”

The title track of Works For Tomorrow is a collapse. Over the last few albums the band has added Mark Greenberg on keys and now it has James Elkington on second guitar, returning to the double six-string attack of the early days. But the Jim Thompson noir of those times, the people with no way out in a world they can’t deal with — that’s everyone now, right? If there is a hope in this music, it’s that there are works for tomorrow — fervid shouts against the certainty of compliance that says today will be like any other day except a little worse. The truth of a riff cracking open ears that didn’t know hope existed. Something to hear and carry forward past the horseshit of where we are now.

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“Take care of me, and I’ll take care of you”

Where we are isn’t new, of course. (Hell, this list gimmick isn’t even new, Jason Cohen did it at Pitchfork back in 2015, albeit with fewer songs, and I’m pleased to have minimal overlap with his also-excellent choices.) The destruction of institutions supposed to help, the elevation of people reveling in hurt — it’s happened elsewhere, it’s happened here, although maybe not as quickly as now. Five years ago everything fell apart and the one saving grace was, at least for a little while, that everyone was too shocked to and scared to really get selfish. I don’t think that will happen again. Since Grazed, Eleventh Dream Day’s most recent album to date, came out in 2021; it references the pandemic and while there are moments of brightness (“Yves Klein Blues” is a wonderfully sweet love song) it is their quietest and most mournful record since Eighth. 

But the guitar hook of “Take Care” is an emergency, a dopplering siren of an ambulance that will never get to where it needs to be. So we’ll have to save ourselves. “The windmills pass and the stillness reveals the coming storm and what we feel,” Rizzo sings in a voice that is less harsh than in the past but no less purposeful, no less clear, bolstered by McCombs’ somber yet nimble bass and washes of sound from Elkington and Greenberg. “So rolling thunder, let roll away, the choice was never not to stay.” And there it is, one more refusal to retreat, the moment of truth that calls the chorus around again. Care is comfort and care is protection. It’s an action and a promise that is not about reciprocity but solidarity. Take care of me, and I’ll take care of you. “It’s better when we do,” Rizzo and Bean harmonize, and then Bean’s drums finally kick the song open into a furor of noise that now has an insistent beat to go with that careening alarm of a riff. The guitar lines sprawl and collide, not heroic or anthemic because there is no certainty of victory here. But they’re going to kick up a fucking racket while they fight.