Eleventh Dream Day may possibly be the best band you"ve never heard, and their influence reaches far beyond their seven albums. Founding members also contribute to the musical canon through the postrock band Tortoise and the excellent country outfit Freakwater. But despite the breadth and success of those projects, it"s a blessing when the wandering artists head back home to the Eleventh Dream Day hearth, and Stalled Parade is their best homecoming yet. Rather than change with each album, the band continues to explore the sonic territory between hush and bang with ever-increasing whimsy, innovation, and reverence. Evoking great drama in the confluence of opposites: silence and noise, entropy and melody, they sometimes manage to be everything at once. Even the interplay between Rick Rizzo"s hushed, intimate whisper and Janet Beveridge Bean"s resonant croon, which dips and soars with a cellist"s proficiency, manages to be both dialogue and argument. In the hands of anyone else, "Valrico74" would be just a quiet little ditty, but Eleventh Dream Day create a jumbled collage built from scraps of Bean"s haunting melody, a plunked random piano, a subtle surf of feedback, and just a bit of the guitar freak-out that Bean"s husband, Rizzo, excels at (he sounds a bit like Neil Young channeling outer-space feedback). The result is beautiful but vaguely unsettling. "Ice Storm" is vintage Eleventh Dream Day, with a chilling guitar squall and thumping backbeat. "Way Too Early on Sunday Morning" may be the best thing they"ve ever recorded, a song that wavers with a hangover"s intensity, gradually building toward an uncomfortable crisis then easing into a sunny denouement. The album"s title may suggest the band members are taking a breather before marching off again, but as the musical journeys on Stalled Parade attest, you don"t need to leave home to go far, far away. --Tod Nelson