Blood Sucking Maniacs is the newest record by the estimable Texas singer-songwriter and multidisciplinary artist Terry Allen, and it’s also a family band experience encompassing members rooted by birth (a mother from beyond the grave Pauline, sons Bukka and Bale, grandsons Sled, Calder, and Kru, the fetal heartbeat of great grandchild Lucky Marlo), by the ritual of marriage (Terry’s wife Jo Harvey Allen, granddaughter-in-law Sophie) and also by surrogate bonds (Richard Bowden and Lloyd Maines, both longtime Panhandle Mystery Band members, plus Will and Charlie Sexton).
Offering 22 tracks across four sides of vinyl, the music that shapes Blood Sucking Maniacs is warm and casual but never unfocused. It’s a sheer pleasure to soak up, with the set releasing on April 24 in a 140-gram black vinyl edition tucked into a gatefold sleeve with an essay by Allen biographer Brendan Greaves. Compact disc and digital options are also available.
Terry Allen has recorded a slew of albums since hitting the radar from the fringes of the Texas music scene in the mid-1970s. If his first and second records, Juarez from ’75 and Lubbock (On Everything) from ’79, are the ones most often recommended as introductions to his work, Allen’s output has never suffered a stumble in quality. A listener could jump into his discography through basically any release and work forward and backward to a fulfilling result.
Although Blood Sucking Maniacs is not a Terry Allen album per se, as he is but one contributor among many in the set’s weave, it’s still as fine a place as any to get acquainted with his brilliance. It’s fair to say the Blood Sucking Maniacs band owes its existence to Terry’s artistic ambitions and to his union with Jo Harvey, who is also a multidisciplinary artist of considerable achievement. They were married in 1961.
Although the exquisite barrelhouse piano of Pauline Allen and the steam locomotive-like beating heart of Lucky Marlo establish the timeframe parameters of the Allen family’s persistence, it’s really the marriage of Terry and Jo Harvey and their reality as patriarch and matriarch of a tiered-generational pool of musical sweetness that solidifies Blood Sucking Maniacs as part of Terry’s oeuvre, deepens Jo Harvey’s centrality to the whole scheme, and illuminates the Allen family as a crucial branch on the beautifully gnarled-up tree of Texas tradition.
Heard in isolation, the most songlike of songs here, e.g., “Bloodlines,” “Dirt Road,” “Let It All In,” “Arroyo Nights,” “Where We Belong,” fit into a tradition that blends hearty Americana, discerning alt-country, and an astute extension of roots-richness in general. But, soaked up as a whole, with the spoken-word contributions and numerous instrumental interludes, effectively highlights Blood Sucking Maniacs’ conceptual reality. It’s in “Down to the River” where the songlike and the thematic come together so wonderfully.
There’s no strain between songs and theme, however. A few of the tracks, like the loping title cut and the rippling racket of distortion that is “A Pogo Is a Logo,” further establish this album as a thorough evasion of norms, much less clichés. Terry Allen’s consistently been more art-school than typically outlaw, and so it remains with the superb family excursion of Blood Sucking Maniacs.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
