Cure for Pain - Morphine (1993)
I talk often about how weird and wonderful and unique the music industry of the early 90s was. There were huge explosions of new sounds and ideas in multiple genres, and the industry was set up well to capture those explosions’ commercial potential.
But while you could see the 90s music biz as a cynical money-grab, you also can’t deny that the search for the next cool new thing opened up a lot of space for artists who wouldn’t have ever had a chance of being noticed a few years before.
Morphine weren’t flashy or glitzy or even very loud (although they’d get louder with their next release). But they had a coherent sound that was genuinely unusual, and with it released an almost perfect mix of groove-first dance cuts and gorgeous and plaintive pop tunes.
The ingredients are simple: slide bass, brash sax, and under-the-beat drums. But what they put to tape with that limited sound pallette is still just as stunning as it was the first time I heard it more than 30 years ago.
Cure For Pain is a unique product of its moment and a unique product of a unique outfit.
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The band’s follow-up to Cure For Pain was 1995’s Yes, a much more snarling, attitude-heavy, made-for-rock-radio release that showed a very different side of the band. You can argue which album is the most representative of their work, I suppose, but each is a classic that has its place in your collection.
