In February 2004, Pixies reunited. People lost their marbles. Tickets for an official run of reunion shows sold out at a record-setting pace, some dates in less than just three minutes. Their comeback became the first of many during the 00s, defunct or dormant indie rock luminaries like Dinosaur Jr., Superchunk, Slint, and even Pavement returning to stages and levels of attention they had never seen in their relative, pre-Internet heyday. When those Pixies tickets flew off e-shelves seven years ago, Chicago's Eleventh Dream Day hadn't called it quits since forming in 1981. They were and continue to be first-wave, American indie rock survivors whose legacy has become, at this point, less about their music and more about surviving. Riot Now!, the veteran outfit's first full-length in five years is a meat-and-potatoes rock record that goes one step further in explaining why that it is.
From the very beginning, EDD's sound was without frills. Their debut LP, 1988's Prairie School Freakout, was a pre-grunge guitar workout that was recorded live in six hours. The result was as raw as it was visceral, its of-the-moment feel and barrage of classic rock hooks enough to gain them some love from Atlantic, the major that lifers would argue fumbled this band's trajectory. Twenty years after the alt-rock earthquake that Nevermind triggered, that's a common story. But with the exception of the girl/boy vocals rounded out by frontman Rick Rizzo and Janet Beveridge Bean, EDD's sound was equally so. As a teen, Rizzo had learned to play the guitar with Neil Young and Crazy Horse's Zuma, an album whose loud, gutsy, sleeves-rolled-up feel also became EDD's. This is still very much the case and in fact, all of Riot Now! was recorded as Crazy Horse did for a time: in single takes. Be it in face-punching opener "Damned Tree" or the squall of "Satellite", what you hear here is a band who sounds like they must be monstrous in a live setting.
Ultimately, that's to the benefit of EDD and Riot Now!. There's always something to be said about a band who can simply plug in and blow your hair back on any given night. But this isn't a record to turn to for similarly explosive songwriting. Songs like "Cold Steel Gray" or "Tall Man" boast as much verve as "That's What Coming" and "Sonic Reactor" do a sense of strong yet forgettable, Neil Young-indebted guitar wankery. That said, much of this record will translate brilliantly to a rock club with one exception: "Divining for Water", far and away the high point here, is a fist-pumper anywhere and everywhere. Surprisingly, it's a simple three-chord strummer with far less distortion than anything else here. But there's a depressing, equalizing, Rizzo and Bean-shared line that goes: "The smarter you get, the less it seems/ That anybody cares about your dreams." Resist the urge to scoff, because later, atop a blanket of ba-ba-ba, ba-ba-ba-da-da-da's they deliver some salient, comforting truth in closing, "what's left behind, might be enough/ But it's gonna take a whole lot more than luck."
