The Night by Morphine

The Night, Morphine's fifth and final studio album, came out on DreamWorks in 2000, months after Mark Sandman died of a heart attack onstage at a festival in Palestrina, Italy, in July 1999. Sandman produced it himself, and it plays like a last late-night transmission from the Cambridge band that called its own music low rock.

For a decade Morphine had built everything on the same bare frame: Sandman's two-string bass and deep, unhurried croon, Dana Colley's baritone sax and the drums, with no guitar hero in sight. Here the frame finally opens up. Acoustic guitars, organ, strings and female backing voices creep into the smoky rooms, and the title track sets the mood: slow, nocturnal, a little haunted. Coming after Like Swimming, it sounds less like a reinvention than a band quietly widening the doorway, which makes the ending hurt all the more.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.