Their career cut short by the death of leader Mark Sandman in 1999, Morphine’s was a dark and perhaps unreachable world. Dana Colley’s saxes stood in for the absent guitar, while Sandman’s two-string slide-bass guitar ensured a textural elasticity absent from most of their contemporaries. Musically, they patrolled the grounds between noir-ish sordidness (“You Look Like Rain”) and grunge-meets-punk-jazz (“Cure For Pain”). Surprisingly resourceful in their arrangements (the panoramic sweep of “Super Sex”) and sometimes poignant (“The Night”), the whole is let down by Sandman’s featureless, blank baritone. The strongest track is the ecstatic noise-riffing of “Eleven O’Clock”.
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