Where the previously released title track introduced the band’s raucous, sprawling personality, “Down to the River” reveals an entirely different register. The song is a duet between Jo Harvey Allen and Terry Allen — a paean to their shared love of, and through, travel, and what the band describes as the album’s spiritual centrepiece. It contains the album’s most singular and breathtaking image, transporting listeners to the Bay of Bengal, “where bonfires reflect the slow dark oxen / where a hundred blue sails draw against the dawn.” It is no surprise that Jo Harvey, the family’s foremost poet and actor, offers the richest and most dramatic language on the album.
Blood Sucking Maniacs spans five generations and 121 years, from the fetal heartbeat of great-grandchild Lucky Marlo to cassette recordings of Terry’s late mother Pauline, captured in Amarillo in the 1970s. The band’s ranks include sons Bukka and Bale Allen, grandsons Kru, Sled, and Calder, and longtime collaborators Lloyd Maines, Richard Bowden, Charlie Sexton, and Will Sexton. The songs collected on the album range from heartrending ballads to arch in-jokes, bound together by what the Allens call “not so much blood harmony as blood entropy.”
Source: klofmag.com