Few—if any—indie rock bands have been subject to as much armchair quarterbacking as Eleventh Dream Day. They had the songs, they had the chops, but they just never quite got the timing right. Their brief dalliance with the majors was, by most accounts, an unmitigated disaster; Atlantic so badly botched—and then quickly abandoned—1993's would-be breakthrough El Moodio that the band issued a director's cut of sorts, New Moodio, in 2013. They may not've found the fame they deserved in the post-Nevermind land grab, but the years that followed have been awfully kind; widely beloved among indie rock's older guard, with 12 good-to-great records to their name, they've found the freedom to follow their own serpentine path wherever it leads. In the wake of New Moodio—a record that may've just put all that "what if?" talk to bed—EDD seem revitalized*: Works for Tomorrow*, their latest, is their fieriest record in years, and among their finest ever.
Produced by keyboardist Mark Greenberg, Works is a crisp, punchy-sounding record, not far from the unfussy, live-in-a-room feel of early triumphs like Prairie School Freakout. Works came together quickly; on their first day alone, they'd tracked 13 songs, 10 of which show up here. Works is also the first Eleventh Dream Day record in two decades to feature a second guitarist with Jim Elkington of Tweedy and the Horse's Ha. Elkington and singer/guitarist Rick Rizzo have an immediate on-record chemistry. Rizzo's gloriously ragged, Neil Young-jocking leads have long been EDD's signature, and with Elkington at his side, they can kick up twice the dust.
Works charges out of the gate with "Vanishing Point", in which Janet Beveridge Bean does her damnedest to earn whoever's listening a speeding ticket. Every time she wails "I'm gonna take it from the inside, I'm gonna take it slow," the song's taut, krautrock-indebted pulse seems to quicken. Bean's never held back, exactly, but the way she tears into "Vanishing"—and her searing mid-LP cover of Judy Henske and Jerry Yester's psych-blues stomper "Snowblind"—is something else entirely. Rizzo, as ever, is a quizzical, around-the-beat singer. The pair's frequent harmonizing has only deepened with time, so that the slightest shift in affect from either one changes the entire feel of the line. The raucous, gospel-tinged "Go Tell It" finds Rizzo doing his best Lou Reed, with Bean answering with an even-better Merry Clayton, while plainly gorgeous late-LP highlight "Deep Lakes" finds the pair sighing their way through a perserverer's anthem: "I'm alive, we survived," they sing, with striking calm.
Works, Rizzo's said in interviews, is his attempt to locate the source of some recent emotional turmoil. "My mom's side is northern Europe Swedish and my dad is Italian," he told the Chicago Tribune, "so you've got the Italian emotional half, and on the Swedish side, there's this attitude that you don't talk about the past. That warm front, cold front collision ends up causing a storm." Never is this clearer than on closer "End With Me", which finds Rizzo out east, visiting relatives' graves, trying to figure out why everything behind him seems to be getting in his way. By digging into—and then letting go of—that past, Rizzo can finally reckon with the present. Even if he hadn't spelled it out, that feeling's all over Works for Tomorrow: what's done is done, but right now, things are looking up.
