I Want Blood CD

“We cut them open, carve out their guts, and fill their innards up with stones…”               As opening lyrics go, the first line of Suburban Dirts’ new album is powerful, if gruesome. I Want Blood tells the story of brothers Micajah ‘Big’ Harpe and Wiley ‘Little’ Harpe: American War Of Independence mercenaries, highwaymen, river pirates, rapists, thieves, who are generally accepted to be America’s first serial killers -- their signature kill was gutting the poor devils they murdered and, as the lyric attests, filling their bodies with stones before dumping them in the river. The Harpes were so devoid of remorse or conscience that even their notoriously ruthless one-time associates, the Mason Gang, were appalled when the brothers started strapping naked, beaten victims to horses, and running them over a cliff. Just because.             The Suburban Dirts hail not from Tennessee or Kentucky, where the Harpes made their black-hearted reputation, but Hoddesdon, in Hertfordshire. The band has been playing around the UK Americana/roots scene since forming as a four-piece in 2011. Now filled out to six members -- John Wheatley (lead vocal/acoustic guitar/harmonica), Chris Varley (bass), David Austin (drums/vocals), David Moyes (guitar), Jay Seymour (keyboards), Joolz Addison (violin) -- they fit recording and playing around their day-jobs. Wheatley works in film, Varley is a gardener, and Austin is working on his philosophy PhD. “We’re massive film and literature nerds, and David's always fed bits of philosophy back to us through his studies,” Wheatley says. “It had a profound effect on the album.”             I Want Blood is the Dirts’ third album. And it’s a game-changer. Taking the band not just into territory that their previous work seldom hinted at, but striking a new high-bar for UK Americana. “We wanted to make something epic, cinematic, and became interested in pre-cowboy America, real frontier stuff. We’re also very much into soundtracks, like Badly Drawn Boy’s About A Boy, or albums you absorb as a whole piece, like The Beatles’ Abbey Road. Themes and musical ideas drift in and out at different times, short musical interludes sit between proper songs, which all help tell the story.”             There’s certainly a tale to be told here, and, at its heart, I Want Blood is a love story.               Switching from the evil intent of opening track The Harpe Brothers Theme and its chilling first lines to the soft and gently bucolic piano ballad, Eli, it’s bold, confident, and immersed in its subject. Everything turns on the album’s middle track, The Wedding & The Uninvited, where all the promise and hope of a betrothal is violently disrupted by the arrival of the unholy Harpes. From there, the blackness of The Hunt’s southern Gothic horror flows into the grungy bloodlust of The Ballad Of Little Harpe, the country gospel redemption of Where There’s A Will, and the final, elegiac epilogue of As Long As You Are.             You might think that I Want Blood is the soundtrack to some long-lost movie, and you wouldn't be far from the truth. As Wheatley explains, "We really did feel like we were working on a film or a novel, which helped us ground the content and the mood of each song, and the dynamic of the album as a whole. We would love to turn it into any one of these. It’s ambitious, but why not?” Why not indeed. Treat yourself to the greatest movie you’ve never seen, the best novel you’ve never read. Listen to I Want Blood. It turns expectations of what UK Americana is on its head, spins it round, then throws it off a cliff.