Eleventh Dream Day records at a leisurely pace – producing an album once every five years or so. But it’s not like anybody’s slacking off. Day jobs, families, numerous other recording projects and bands – Rick Rizzo, Janet Bean, Doug McCombs and Mark Greenberg don’t have much down time. So whenever their schedules align and Eleventh Dream Day reconvenes, they’re in sprinter’s mode. That was especially true of “Riot Now!” (Thrill Jockey), the latest album in a career that stretches back to the early ‘80s.
It was recorded in two days, mostly first takes, after the Chicago band had honed the songs during a residency at the Hideout. The sound is appropriately violent and unruly, Bean’s drums rolling and tumbling around McCombs’ strident bass lines and Rizzo’s sheets-of-sound guitar, while Greenberg’s keyboards spackle the cracks in the arrangements with drone.
“I’ve been playing with a Les Paul (guitar) and Super Reverb, and if you turn it up to ‘10’ in the studio and let it rip, it sounds really great,” Rizzo says of a guitar tone that echoes the mayhem he routinely raised on stages in the early days of the band. “We’re getting ready to play a show and I realized I had ripped a speaker. My amp couldn’t take it anymore. We go away for awhile, but everytime we get together the band just finds that place automatically. The amazing part is Janet’s drumming. She doesn’t rehearse and then she comes in there and plays like she does.”