Beet,' by Eleventh Dream Day, is one of those albums that makes it seem incredible that not so long ago the guitar was thought to be dead. As if further evidence were needed of the instrument's resurgence, this band arrives with strings ablaze. The dual guitars of Rick Rizzo and Baird Figi come closer to Neil Young with Crazy Horse than to the sound of Sonic Youth, but Eleventh Dream Day's major-label debut rarely resembles a retread. The band members play with the conviction of ground-breakers, not the studied approach of footstep followers.

In the hands of this Chicago band – which in 1988 released the impressive independent "Prairie School Freakout" – the guitar can serve as a psychic probe ("Love to Hate to Love"), a nuclear anti-Deadhead device ("Bomb the Mars Hotel") or an instrument of emotional catharsis ("Awake I Lie"). The lyrics indicate that Rizzo, the band's major writer and vocalist, is a little too earnest, infatuated with the romance of bohemian wanderlust. Happily, "Bagdad's Last Ride," by drummer Janet Beveridge Bean (also the band's harmony vocalist and Rizzo's spouse), benefits from a lighter touch.

After "Between Here and There" opens the album in flamethrower fashion (with an offhand tribute to the MC5), the band demonstrates considerable song-craft amid the sonic assault. Splitting the difference between the giddiest exhilaration and the most desperate anxiety, the guitars are not virtuoso instruments; they are the means to emotion. Like the soundtrack to a fever dream, Beet pulses with primal urgency. (RS 571)

DON MCLEESE