When writing four years ago about the reissues of Terry Allen’s Bloodlines and Smokin The Dummy albums from the eighties, I made much of his place as a pioneer in alternative country, how he was ahead of his time, criminally underrated as a performer and quietly multi-faceted in his appreciation and participation in other creative mediums such as theatre and art. I did note that his wife, Jo Harvey Allen, had written a one-woman play, but I must confess I had no idea just how large a creative unit his wider family were, or anything about their long history. Blood Sucking Maniacs straightens this oversight out in the best possible way, with a pan-generational family musical and conceptual creation that is both cohesive and radically diverse in its Americana flavours. This assemblage, anchored by Terry and Jo, spans five generations and 121 years. Their circle folds in sons Bukka and Bale Allen; grandsons Kru, Sled, and Calder Allen; Panhandle Mystery Band stalwarts Charlie Sexton, Lloyd Maines, and Richard Bowden, plus longtime ally Will Sexton. Giving themselves the collective name Blood Sucking Maniacs, the songs are free, wild, tender, and gloriously unruly. Put all the contributions together, and we find a mash-up of heart-punch ballads, familial rib-prods, and everything in between, shifting from the sublime to the unabashedly sentimental with maximum integrity.
The name was inspired by their son Bale, who, in the seventies, built a front-yard “vampire trap” in Fresno. An odd tangle of crucifixes, mirrors and deadfall that revealed an early artist’s mind at work. Half a century on, Blood Sucking Maniacs echoes that contraption: a messy, symbolic, protective, and slightly unhinged device through which the Allen family assembles, defends, and interprets itself. If you are a little confused by the number of years I claim the generations span here, I should explain that there is an appearance from Terry’s barrelhouse-piano-playing mother, remembered as a “hellraiser,” who died in 1984. Beaming in on a sea of lo-fi dustiness, Pauline and her stride style piano appear twice, thanks to her being captured on cassette tape sometime in the seventies; there is Blues, which serves as a clever inter-connecting instrumental and the opening track, marrying her ivory tickling to the actual ultrasound heartbeat of Terry and Jo’s first great grandchild, Lucky Marlo. To be clear, though, this album is not overwhelmed by audio conceptual trickery; there is, as anyone familiar with Terry’s long storied career, some mighty fine music to be heard. Early on, there is the rhapsodic title track, which is essentially a theme tune for the whole project and as such, it works a treat; built on a foundation that positively demands we sing-along to the chorus hook.
Terry and Jo are at the centre of it all, contributing five tunes each, including their heartstring-plucking reading of the blues standard It Hurts Me Too, which is re-titled When Things Go Wrong, because, as Terry told Jo, “the struggle of love is the important part.” Sometimes the presence of Jo’s matriarchal voice is all that is required to inject the production with the close connectedness of family history. This is true of the spoken intro on Peaches And Sap, where she lists the song’s long domestic backstory beginning with her grandmother singing the lullaby to her mother; in fact, the spoken start takes up more time than the actual song. Most of the writing and recording unfolded at their place in Santa Fe and at the Kitchen Sink studio, and Jo remembers it as “the most joyous time of all of us working together,” the kind of capstone only a family living in a collaboration-friendly life could pull off. “You could hear music coming from all over the house. Calder was learning piano from Kru, Kru was learning accordion from Bukka, everyone was learning new licks and just having so much fun.” Of course, joy didn’t erase the chaos. Terry did recall that “getting everybody together was like herding cockroaches.”
Everyone has brought their A-game to a unique project that wraps its listeners in love, warmth, provocation, fluctuation, dry wit, and immense wisdom.
The work that has been born out of this overly complex coordinating was absolutely worth all the effort; there are very few albums in the US roots canon that cross-pollinate the ages as naturally as we hear here. A track like Dirt Road could be Iron and Wine, such is the contemporary sheen brought by younger voices and their 21st-century musical ticks. It is Terry and Jo who occupy the emotional centre ground though, their duet Down To The River is impossibly beautiful in relating a love that has survived, and the audio brush strokes ignite some potent imagery. This versatility in ability and open-minded technique has always been the understated source of Terry’s genius. The man himself sees it as no great shakes, often defending his practices with a dismissive “it’s all the same thing” when asked of his engagement with differing mediums. But as effortless as it may feel to him and as natural as the wider Allen family have made all this sound, there is nothing watered down or gimmicky about the music packed into a massive twenty-two tracks that still somehow fly past. Everyone has brought their A-game to a unique project that wraps its listeners in love, warmth, provocation, fluctuation, dry wit, and immense wisdom. I quietly predict undetected moments of splendour will continue to leap out of this album even on your hundredth listen.
Blood Sucking Maniacs (April 24th, 2026) Paradise of Bachelors