Starting off the week with a band I’ve wanted to run for a few years now, but could never find a decent enough live recording to share with you. Eleventh Dream Day, playing on home turf at The Empty Bottle in Chicago on May 16, 2004. Again, thanks to the nimble fingers and dogged determination of Adaam Jacobs and his admirable archive.
There is a very distinct difference between capturing an adequate representation of a band in a live context and making a bootleg recording. One is usually via the road or house crew, tapped into the soundboard and largely given blessings by the artist. The other is a random recording by someone with a microphone sitting either in the 90th row or next to a hacking (or loaded) consumptive where music is drowned out in noise and vocals are missing altogether – those are usually condemned by the artist and everyone agrees, does no one any favors.
So running across this concert is something of a breath of fresh air.
I have always liked Eleventh Dream Day but often wondered if what I was hearing was based largely on my imagination or they weren’t as good live as I had thought. Comes to pass that my enthusiasm was no fluke and I was just hearing material that didn’t do them justice.
Here’s a little background via Jason Ankeny at Allmusic.com to get up to speed if you already aren’t:
The career of the noisy guitar unit Eleventh Dream Day — one of the most resilient and criminally underappreciated bands to rise from the Midwestern underground community — is a textbook study in alt rock endurance. Despite a nightmarish major-label tenure, ill-timed roster changes, and commercial indifference, the group persevered, ultimately emerging as elder statesmen of the flourishing Chicago independent scene of the mid-’90s. 1991’s Lived to Tell was a guitar-fueled highlight of their major-label period; 1997’s Eighth found them still powerful and compelling despite a return to the independent community and being stripped down to a trio; 2006’s muscular Zeroes and Ones, and 2021’s more contemplative Since Grazed demonstrated that even though they were only a part-time band, they were still making music every bit as strong as they did in their salad days.
Check out the whole article on Allmusic’s website.
Back to lunch
