Bloodletting (The Vampire Song)

“Bloodletting (The Vampire Song)” opens the Bloodletting album exactly the way an opening track should. It arrives before you are ready. Johnette Napolitano wrote it after spending time in New Orleans, reading Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles and thinking about grief and disappearance and the way some people drain the life from everything around them. The song is not about vampires. It is about loss of human happiness. Rice’s mythology was just the most precise language available.

Bloodletting was released in 1990 on IRS Records and became the album that broke the band to a wider audience. “Joey” got the radio play, but “Bloodletting” is the song that opens the door. Napolitano’s voice does not ornament the emotion, it carries it without insulation. Jim Mankey’s guitar holds the tension. The band moved between gothic rock and alternative without fully belonging to either, which is the only position from which genuinely strange music can be made. The song sounds like a place you recognize without having been there.

Concrete Blonde formed in Los Angeles in 1982, originally as Dream 6. Napolitano on bass and vocals, Jim Mankey on guitar, Harry Rushakoff on drums. They signed to IRS Records and released four studio albums before disbanding in 1994. Reunions followed. The band has never entirely gone away, which makes sense, because Bloodletting has never stopped finding new listeners. The dark ones travel slowly and arrive when the time is right.