Death is a dirty little bitch, isn't she? She takes someone away whenever she wants, and she does not care about circumstances. And this is exactly what she did with Mark Sandman, converting Morphine's Italian concert into a Greek tragedy... and a very abstract and impressive one! When one listens to Morphine's The Night, thoughts like these go through your mind. This is possibly one of the best albums made by this band, if not the best. After the somewhat disappointing (yet still good) Like Swimming, Sandman and his boys realized that the time of their musical evolution had come.
This led them to incorporating elements never heard before in Morphine's music: mellotrons, female voices (which did appear in Like Swimming, though less noticeably), strings, piano, Eastern flourishes, acoustic guitars, extra percussion (courtesy of Morphine's ex-drummer Jerome Dupree), and a cosmic jazz organ played by John Medeski (from Medeski, Martin & Wood) which makes for an attractive and recognizable collaboration. The result was no less than an album full of beauty and complexity. This time around, Morphine came up with an album that was perhaps warmer, more mysterious, and more emotional than ever before.
All of the tracks in this album are excellent. However, the standouts include: the romantically dark "The Night," with atmospheres recalling Leonard Cohen or Nick Cave; "Like a Mirror," which might be what Portishead would sound like without electronics (and let's not forget the Waits-ish influences); the Eastern-flavored "Rope on Fire" and "Take Me With You" (whose lyrics give the impression that Sandman was expecting death very soon); the melodically abstract "The Way We Met"; and the rhythmic "Top Floor Bottom Buzzer" and "So Many Ways."
The Night is one of Morphine's best albums, if not the best. It's a well-crafted piece of art that makes you wish Sandman had lived longer so we could hear more of Morphine's new, promising direction; it sounds as if the best was about to happen. No doubt, they'll be missed.
