Three Decades Of Morphine’s Masterpiece :: “Cure For Pain”
While slipping in-between the multidimensional seasons of both hysteria and harmonious genius, it has been just a little over 30 years since Cambridge legends, Morphine, released perhaps one of the most important and crucially compelling albums of the 1990s. Though they were overlooked and severely unconsidered within the popularity circles brought on by the rising phenomenon of the “Grunge” movement that ultimately consumed everything and everyone, Morphine had something that most groups of the time lacked, or had no atmospheric access to. Their ritualistic rhythm and sophisticatedly sobering ballads lashed out against the corporate efforts of success and its socially suicidal reach for artists and, instead of giving into the bottled elixir of an excited economy, they unleashed a collection of songs that stand as some of the most powerful and, melodically majestic efforts by any band of their time. 1993’s, "Cure For Pain” is as brilliant as it is tragic as it transports its loosely lucid listeners into a temporarily holy setting of consistent reflection and transcendental teachings.
The metaphysics of the music in which Morphine inhabited so iconically is deeply layered and complex as it stretches across the stratosphere of sonic accomplishments by way of explosive energy and the jazzed out jam of brotherhood. Completing the album sometime in the fall of 1993, Morphine had already secured their place in the ever-changing world of music with 1991’s debut, “Good”. While hanging onto the busy balance of the horizontal haunting, the band’s original drummer, Jerome Deupree was replaced by the late Billy Conway due to unforeseen complications, both personally and in health, and the newly formed trio began their steady embrace of what would become the group’s second album “Cure For Pain”. Working with acclaimed producer Paul Q. Kolderie of such notable acts like Radiohead, Pixies and Dinosaur Jr., Morphine were in good hands when it came to tackling the diverse tonality and all around culture of what would eventually become the band’s prized masterpiece.
While battling the crucial commute between rock & Roll and R&B, Morphine manifested the poetic paralysis of the late Mark Sandman’s visceral vocabulary upon the back of some ancient artifact of echoing virtu, where the cerebral chanting of an audience completely transfixed on their melodic movement twirls under the tonal twilight. Across the album’s 13 tracks of both the eventful and electrified tides of a crashing gospel, rests an impeccable collection of celebrated melodies of the highest order. Its sobering light throbs in the dark like that of some caved in chest of breathing prayer, while its darkened hands wave high towards a descending sky full of highly anticipated anesthesia albatrosses. Barreling out of the ultra-silvery universe and straight into the galactic gardens of past, present and future, lingers this devilish style from a brilliant band that sincerely left behind one of the most cool and collectively contagious catalogs and has since transcended into harmonious history. With numbers like “I’m Free Now”, “Candy”, “In Spite Of Me” and the album’s luxurious title track, “Cure For Pain” effortlessly leads its listeners both new and old into the poetic labyrinths and crystallized catacombs to further explore the enlightening depths of an illuminating experience in modern music.
