Pitchfork

[Posted Tuesday, September 2nd, 2003 02:00:00 Pitchfork Central Time]

Thrill Jockey is getting ready to reissue Eleventh Dream Day's first album, 1988's Prairie School Freakout, on October 7th. The album will also feature all four tracks from the long-lost Wayne EP. The reissue comes as a two-disc set, with the second disc featuring some very early live footage. Tracklist:

Disc one:
01 Watching the Candles Burn
02 Sweet Smell
03 Coercion
04 Driving Song
05 Tarantula
06 Among the Pines
07 Through My Mouth
08 Beach Miner
09 Death of Albert C. Sampson
10 Life on a String
11 Tenth Leaving Train
12 Southern Pacific
13 Go

Disc two:
01 Arsonist
02 Watching the Candles Burn [live in Boston]
03 Among the Pines [live in Cleveland]

And just to complete the nostalgia trip, Eleventh Dream Day are getting the old band back together for a little reunion show at Chicago's Double Door on November 22nd. Rick Rizzo, Doug McCombs (Brokeback, Tortoise, etc.), Janet Beveridge Bean (more recently of Freakwater fame) and Baird Figi will be back onstage together for the first time in a good long while. No word on whether this is a sign of a more permanent rapprochement, but we'll take what we can get.

Eleventh Dream Day were (and continue to be) an exuberant rock 'n' roll band regardless of whether it was fashionable and okay to be so, and we love them for that. Many people swear undying loyalty to Beet, their first release for major label Atlantic. After the corporate dream went inevitably sour, they continued to ply their trade with Thrill Jockey, also home to Bean's Freakwater and McComb's various projects, most recently getting back on people's radar screens with 2000's very fine (and John McEntire produced) Stalled Parade. While some of the Thrill Jockey excursions might not quite have worked in the same way they did back in the proverbial day (Doug McCombs went and joined Tortoise after Eleventh Dream Day, so their work became a bit less rock-y and a bit more post-rock-y, if you know what we're saying), it's not too much of a stretch to say that you can trace some of the roots of both grunge and alt-country to Eleventh Dream Day's doorstep, even though many of the exponents of both those genres would not realize or acknowledge the debt.