Morphine: Cure for Pain

Have you ever listened to a record that just sounds like night?  Night in a dusky subterranean bar or a drugged-out mid century modern manse in the Hollywood hills with smoke hanging in the air and whatever heroine feels like. That’s Morphine. And that’s this album, Cure for Pain, in a nutshell. Music that can’t stand up to sunlight or antiseptic surroundings. This weird amalgam of alt. jazz rock and whatever counts as hepcat, stoner music. Nothing like it really ever existed before or after. It’s singular in its saxophone and Mark Sandman-led cooool vocals. You know it when you hear it and it sets a mood. No wonder Morphine tunes pop up in shows and movies pretty regularly — this music from the 90s that could have happened anytime in the 20th century.

The year grunge broke was 1991. Two years later Cure for Pain hit the shelves. On the surface the music shares absolutely nothing with its grunge rock 2nd cousin, but something about the darkness and slur speaks to one another on an altered plane of existence. I don’t see anywhere that lead singer and lyricist Sandman took drugs, but it certainly feels like he did. Never mind the band name and everything. And it’s not as if the album is a bummer, but Sandman’s weirdo two-string slide bass and the baritone sax, along with his deep, casual vocal delivery make it feel like you’re either underwater or on some sort of sedative of the illicit variety. Not unlike some of the darker, swirling grunge stuff before it. Though those dudes were almost definitely chasing the dragon.

As much as I don’t like to admit it, I played sax when I was a kid. Up until 8th grade when the orthodontist asked Hipster Mom if she wanted to spend thousands on braces only to have it all undone by an instrument I most definitely wasn’t going to go pro on. I was terrible. I faked my way through jazz band performances. Nobody was fooled. Point is, I always had a soft spot for the sax. Clarence Clemens was a little godlike. I own a David Sandborne LP. Someone bought that for me, so I can’t claim it. But once the 80s drew to a close, the sax became outmoded. Nobody wanted to hear it. So how cool was it that this alternative rock band was pretty much fronted by one? No guitar at all. Just the aforementioned two-string bass, drums and a sax. A power trio with atypical instruments and a sound all its own. A cool power trio, truth be told. Somehow it’s taken me 32 years to review this record, which is a bit of a travesty, really, as it was formative in a weird way. Not that the rest of my collection really sounds anything like it — maybe Soul Coughing and Karate being even in the same universe somewhere — but it gave me that confidence to be certain in my tastes even if nobody else I knew was into it. Because this is still one of the cooler albums to come out of the 90s. Even with the sax.