Sound Check — Geoff Carter: ‘The Night’ a fitting coda for Morphine’s Sandman

Friday, Feb. 11, 2000 | 9:03 a.m.

Geoff Carter's music column appears Fridays. Reach him at carter@vegas.com

Boston-based trio Morphine was the most frustrating kind of wild card. The band's sound was nearly unclassifiable; the All-Music Guide places it -- wholly arbitrarily, it seems -- between Ben Folds Five and Soul Asylum. In fact, Morphine's sound rests somewhere east of John Coltrane, north of Tom Waits. If dusk could sing, it would sound like Morphine.

Mark Sandman, lead singer and bassist for Morphine, died late last year. He suffered a heart attack and died on stage in Italy, at the age of 46. There's almost a song in there, a blue song, a Morphine song. "Low rock," he called it, an undulating tide of bass, Dana Colley's sax, Billy Conway's drums. Sandman rolled the lyrics out deliberately, languidly. He sounded like a man with time.

"The Night," Morphine's last album, is almost cruelly ironic in the way it brings Sandman's time to a close. It is a brilliant record -- perhaps the band's best. It presents the band in growth mode, tinkering with the sound that earned it a cult following while preserving whatever -- could it be called magic? -- made it unique. The record is deep, resolute -- as resolute as a kiss, and as deep as the woods.

In fact, "The Night" literally begins in the woods; the title track is one of the most revealing tracks Morphine has ever recorded. The album should begin and end with it, to seal the thematic element. Program your CD player accordingly.

Other riches abound. "The Night" isn't a tired collection of discarded and unfinished tracks, the sorry collection of also-rans that seems to follow every musician's death. "The Night" is fresh, as insistent a collection of songs as any recorded yesterday. It finds Morphine in an evolutionary state, augmenting its three-piece arrangement with organ, viola, backing vocals.

Of course, there's still nary a guitar in sight, but who needs one when you've got a jam as sexy as "Top Floor, Bottom Buzzer"? When you've the Waits/Lounge Lizards cool of "Like a Mirror"? When you've got an album closer as lush as "Take Me With You"? The band has never been more passionate, more engaged, and Sandman's lyrics cut the skin. "Like a mirror/I'm nothing till you look at me," he murmurs. The only bloodshed is your own, and you wielded the blade.

All pales, however, next to the unforgettable title track. Over an almost subliminal cello by Jane Scarpantoni, "The Night" finds Sandman "driving down a pitch black road" to a rendezvous with a lover who lives "across a carpet of stars." Alone but unafraid, Sandman wanders into those woods, his path lit only by shafts of cobalt blue coursing through the trees.

"You're the night, Lilah/A little girl, lost in the woods," Sandman sings gently, almost as a lullaby. And he never comes out; the woods envelop him.

It couldn't have happened any other way. Mark Sandman was a romantic, and "The Night," fittingly, is an ending of purest romance. He entreated the night to take him, and take him it did. There could be no ending more beautiful for Mark Sandman's story, a fitting coda for the King of Dreams.