Night visions

Eleventh Dream Day sing for life

by Charles Taylor

The satellites are out and winking on "For a King," the opening track of Eighth (Thrill Jockey), the latest album from the Chicago trio Eleventh Dream Day. Electronic blips filter through the song, and Rick Rizzo's guitar -- each chord hanging in the air long enough to resonate, evaporating bit by bit before being replaced by the next -- sounds as if it were floating up into the night sky to meet them. Janet Beveridge Bean's drums whisper as softly as if she were pouring sand over the heads. The sound might be drifting over the radio, insinuating its way between stations in the middle of a lonely night drive. It's a peaceful sound, but something is off. Bean doesn't begin singing until nearly three and a half minutes into the number, and when she does, it's as soft as a lullaby, as if words would be a violation of the mood. When you make out what she's saying, you realize it's an elegy ("Out like a lion/Laid to rest"), though for what it's not clear. As this moody, oblique album takes hold, it's hard to shake the sensation that Eleventh Dream Day feel as if they were being laid to rest.

The members of the band aren't kids, and their great subject has always been living life (and making art) on the margins. The barflies and working-class losers who inhabit their songs (those characters being the band's most overt debt to country) are consigned to those margins by chance -- the members of Eleventh Dream Day by choice. The subtext of the songs has been owning up to the realization that -- by temperament or sensibility or the strength of deeply held convictions, convictions that had gone out of fashion -- the life you're living is destined to remain out of step with the dominant polity. On their three bracing albums for Atlantic, Beet (1989), Lived To Tell (1991), and El Moodio (1993) (all are out of print), the band refused to take that realization lying down. If this music acknowledged limits, it declined to be damned by them. "The world might be changing outside that door/But it's not my world anymore," they sang on one song, spitting it out like a challenge, not bothering to disguise the bitterness.

The challenge was unmistakable at their last Boston show, in June '93 at the Paradise. It was one of the most powerful rock shows I've ever seen. Nothing was held back. Like Crazy Horse when they're really wailing, Eleventh Dream Day got a sound that night that was hard, full, muscular, and pointed. The music felt as if it had the momentum to bust through the back wall of the club. And without flash or charisma to fall back on, the band had only the music to speak for them. Later that year, in a purge of all the label's alternative acts, they dropped by the geniuses at Atlantic. It was a more subdued sound that emerged on 1994's Ursa Major.

Eighth sounds, to me, like an album of retreat, of talking in a much more tentative language put together with the careful precision of someone speaking in code. Two of the eight tracks here are instrumentals, and most of the other six begin with long, instrumental introductions. The band have always had an interest in psychedelia, in stretching out. Throughout Eighth, the notes Rizzo plays on his guitar have a solitary quality to them. Even the most direct ones reach us through a furred muff. They're like memory-haunted surf music -- or like the slow, heavy chords of Angelo Badalamenti's Twin Peaks theme, only without the peace that music promises.

Relying on the meaning of sound rather than lyrics (they're printed on the CD itself, which makes it impossible to follow along while listening), Eleventh Dream Day seem to be using music as a security check. It's as if the people who were left by the time they get around to the vocals can be entrusted with what they have to say. And the words that do emerge are ambiguous. When Rizzo pleads "Come on, April," it's not clear whether he's singing to a woman or waiting for the thaw.

Time has frozen here. It's a mistake to assume it's solely commercial failure that's turned Eleventh Dream Day inward. The unspoken fear that haunts Eighth is the band's fear of finding themselves in the same position as the characters they've sung about, the fear of being left on the margins without the energy to push against them. The album begins in the same place as the long shot that ends Trees Lounge, with Steve Buscemi's dawning realization that his solitary barstool is his destiny. But the disillusionment and weariness of Eighth go beyond the personal.

Eighth seems to be as true a reaction as I've heard to the bankruptcy of our current political life. With a "centrist" president naively touted by what passes as the left -- a left unwilling to see how he embodies what it claims to oppose -- no opposition seems possible. (Garry Wills reported in the New York Times a few weeks back that Clinton neither prevented White House security guards from wearing surgical gloves during a visit by gay spokesmen nor reprimanded them.) Eighth draws to a close with a leavetaking: "Silence scares me/Disconnected/Cross the miles/Miles of wire/This could be the last time/And it's past time/To let you go." It ends with Rizzo, his voice fading into nothingness, repeating, "You pay and pay." That's not just a personal burden. On Eighth, it sounds like the national debt.