Artist: Morphine
Album: Cure for Pain
Reviewer: Chad Dryden
It’s hard to imagine here in 2024 that vinyl ever went through a “dead era,” but if you hear a collector use that term, it’s likely they’re talking about the ’90s. And I can tell you with certainty (because I was there) that’s exactly what the decade was like for vinyl while the compact disc was peaking.
In the here and now, that means countless beloved albums from the ’90s are either woefully scarce (and painfully expensive) due to limited demand for the format (and thus minuscule original press runs) or unavailable on vinyl – most artists and labels simply never bothered to make it.
Fortunately, in recent years the ’90s have been getting their just due, as the racks at stores like ours are filled with vinyl reissues from an array of artists large and small who made their mark in the last decade of the millennium. Morphine is one of them.
Cure for Pain, originally released in September 1993, was virtually impossible to find on vinyl upon its release – only one pressing surfaced, in 1994, and that was in Brazil. The first U.S. pressing finally arrived in 2011, and now Rhino Records has cut a fresh remaster from the original tapes in conjunction with its annual Rocktober reissue series.
The album was and remains one of my favorite albums from the ’90s, and is universally accepted, more or less, as Morphine’s crowning achievement. The Boston trio – principal songwriter Mark Sandman on vocals and homemade two-string slide bass guitar; Dana Colley on baritone and tenor sax, which he often played simultaneously on stage; and Jerome Deupree then Billy Conway on drums – were scene vets who came together with a decidedly unique concept for jazz-influenced underground rock. In lesser hands, it would be a one-trick gimmick like so many from the era, but the sheer talent of the musicians and Sandman’s fully-formed vision for their aesthetic resulted in a series of incredible albums leading up to his death on stage by heart attack in 1999.
Sandman – whose wry, hipster-cool wit was always on display in interviews and on stage – alternately referred to the Morphine sound as “low rock” or, in a winking nod to the times, “implied grunge.” And certainly there’s a low-end aggression to some of their songs, but ultimately the groove triumphs. Sandman makes the most of his two strings, crafting slinky, sultry and sometimes feedback-soaked bass lines that provide more color than most rock bassists can conjure from a traditional four-string. It’s a foundation for his bohemian lounge-lizard tales, the sort of hazy cigarette-smoke late-night noir that traveled a through line from mid-century jazz to Tom Waits to Jim Jarmusch films. Morphine provided a soundtrack for the fedora-clad hepcats of the ’90s, and it’s no surprise their songs found their way into movies of the time like Get Shorty.
Morphine’s music may have been the product of a certain era and a certain place, but unlike many artists and albums from the ’90s American underground, the moody, infectious Cure for Pain does not come on like a time capsule here in 2024. Seek it out if you haven’t already, or use this fantastic Rocktober reissue as an excuse to revisit a certified classic, then come back for more on Black Friday when Morphine’s B-Sides and Otherwise compilation gets its first-ever vinyl release.