Maddy Costa writes of
Alice and
Blood Money: "Bearing in mind that both albums were recorded in the same sessions, share the same musicians and use much the same instrumentation, the similarities are hardly surprising. Looking back, it is clear that Waits was peculiarly suited to both projects. His songs have long been preoccupied with society's outsiders, with murder and desire... the best songs on
Blood Money merrily rework the skewed rhythms and whirling textures that are Waits's trademark...Waits and Brennan dive into the corrupt, merciless world of Woyzeck with relish; their lyrics are perkily savage, cheerfully nihilistic. 'I'd sell your heart to the junkman baby, for a buck,' snipes 'God's Away on Business', while 'Starving in the Belly of a Whale' warns: 'If you live in hope you're dancing to a terrible tune.' Best of all is 'Misery Is the River of the World', a sinister twist of marimba and blurting bass clarinet, wheezes from an ancient calliope and bubbles of percussion from an Indonesian pod, over which Waits gleefully puffs: 'Misery's the river of the world - everybody row!'" Cohen writes that "This skeletal army of instruments tends to overshadow the vocals on the edgy tracks (more restrained than on
Bone Machine), but the potent 'Knife Chase' (a Peter Gunnish instrumental featuring Waits' son Casey on drums) is a standout. The bluesy 'Another Man's Vine,' the ballad 'Lullaby' and the extraordinary 'The Part You Throw Away' that's like the
pizzicato string backing in
James Brown's '
It's a Man's World' set in the
Ukraine, are my other picks."
Robert Christgau praised
Blood Money, writing "Waits has the bases covered. He's a genius; when he doesn't make masterpieces, he comes close." He preferred it to
Alice, calling
Blood Money "a more consistent record, albeit unbalanced by arbitrary thematic commitments. 'Lullaby' goes someplace new with its quiet 'If I die before you wake/Don't you cry; don't you weep,' and the perfidy-of-woman fable 'Another Man's Vine' approaches tragedy by rejecting contempt. But rather than building off each other, the four life-sucks songs, only 'Everything Goes to Hell' less than inspired, protest too much... Maybe the reason his bandleading stands out so is that, for all his joy in language, it best articulates his deepest compulsion, which is to reject a corrupt present without wallowing in a romanticized past. He forges into the future on old instruments nobody's ever heard of because they were rejects, just like the losers and monsters whose stories he tells. This is honorable, difficult work." Elizabeth Gilbert wrote of the two albums: "The good people at Waits's label, Anti, struck a bit of genius when they decided to release these two albums simultaneously. Because the contrasts of
Alice and
Blood Money perfectly highlight the two aspects of Waits's musical character that have been colliding in his work for decades. On one hand, the man has an unmatched instinct for melody. Nobody can write a more heartbreaking ballad than Waits. On the other hand, he has shown a lifelong desire to unbuckle those pretty melodies... here, on
Alice and
Blood Money, you can see it all together, side-by-side. All that Tom Waits is capable of. All the beauty and all the perversity. All the talent and all the discord. All that he wants to honor and all that he wants to dismantle. All of it gorgeous, all of it transporting." The album ranked at #18 in
Metacritic's Top 30 albums of 2002. As of 2003,
Blood Money has sold 143,000 copies in the US, according to Nielsen Soundscan. The song "God's Away on Business" was featured in
Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005). "All the World is Green" was featured in
The Secret Life of Words (2005) and
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly' (2007). "Misery is the River of the World" was featured in
The X-Files episode "Babylon", which aired on February 16, 2016. "Starving in the Belly of a Whale" was featured in ''
Buster's Mal Heart'' (2016) as the opening song. ==Track listing==