Category — saxophone

Man, I don’t know if you can get any cooler than this pair of albums. Grab your favorite drink or other vice, find a super-good and loud stereo, put these records on and just chill.
Morphine

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Thoughts/Words/Reviews:
Cure for Pain is a most unlikely artistic breakthrough from a thoroughly unlikely band. Fronted by saxophone and two-string slide bass guitar, Morphine earned a modicum of critical praise for their prior recording, Good, but Cure for Pain has a harder edge and a distinctly bigger sound. “Buena” urges the listener, with singer and bassist Mark Sandman’s best come-hither baritone voice, “closer to the front of the stage,” and then “Candy” tells a love-lost story that could come right out of Tom Waits’s book. But for all the strange possibilities inherent in a guitarless band that plays off their singer’s wry lyrics, Morphine’s sophomore effort shows their versatility, their ability to be a rock band in a very unrock, rolling-baritone-saxophone way. Alas, singer Mark Sandman perished in action on an Italian stage on July 3, 1999. –Andrew Bartlett

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Morphine

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Thoughts/Words/Reviews:
In a rock & roll world divided between guitar bands and synth bands, Morphine exist in a no-man’s zone. The Boston trio has neither guitars nor keyboards and gets by with just drums, sax, and bass. In a pop universe where every singer, guitarist, and keyboardist instinctively goes to a higher note to attract attention, Morphine stay hunkered down low. Billy Conway’s tuned drum kit, Dana Colley’s baritone sax and Mark Sandman’s baritone vocals and two-string slide bass all occupy the same low-end band of the sound spectrum. Morphine’s odd configuration would have no more than novelty value if Sandman’s songs weren’t so good. This album’s first single, “Honey White,” for instance, rides the back of a fast, angular baritone riff to describe a pretty, young girl hooked on drugs. In the dark comedy of Sandman’s rock-noir purr, Honey tells her dealer, “You’ll get me when I’m old and wizened and not a day before that.” He replies, “It won’t be that long.” The beat and the humor are essential, for otherwise these jazzy, elliptical mood pieces would become unbearably pretentious. The broken relationship described in “Radar” is a pop cliché, but it’s given new life by the shattered R&B riff and by the nit-picking bickering of lines like “If I am guilty, so are you. It was March 4, 1982.” In similar fashion, modern paranoia and sexual gamesmanship are nailed to the wall in “Sharks” and “Whisper” respectively. –Geoffrey Himes

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