Cure for Pain

Explicit content warning

02/17/21 • 45 min

So, here's the thing. Morphine was one of the best bands to come out of Boston in the '90s. You can argue the point, and you can be wrong. Formed in 1989 by Mark Sandman, Dana Colley, and Jerome Deupree, Morphine combined blues and jazz elements with more traditional rock arrangements, giving the band an unusual sound. Sandman sang distinctively in a "deep, laid-back croon", and his songwriting featured a prominent beat influence. The band themselves coined the label "low rock" to describe their music, which involved "a minimalist, low-end sound that could have easily become a gimmick: a 'power trio' not built around the sound of an electric guitar. Instead, Morphine expanded its offbeat vocabulary on each album."

The band enjoyed positive critical appraisal but met with mixed results commercially. In the United States, the band was embraced and promoted by the indie rock community, including public and college radio stations (WFNX anyone?) and MTV's 120 Minutes, which the band once guest-hosted, but received little support from commercial rock radio and other music television programs. This limited their mainstream exposure and support in their home country, while internationally they enjoyed high-profile success, especially in Belgium, Russia, Portugal, France, and Australia.

For this episode, we take a listen to their 1993 album Cure For Pain. The tracks "Sheila" and "In Spite of Me" were prominently featured on the soundtrack of the 1994 independent film Spanking the Monkey. The video for "Thursday" also appeared on an episode of Beavis and Butt-head. The track "Buena" also appears in the first season of The Sopranos and in the Daria episode "The Teachings of Don Jake". In 2014, the album placed eighth on the Alternative Nation site's "Top 10 Underrated '90s Alternative Rock Albums" list. It also contains one of my personal top 5 songs of all time, "Cure For Pain."

Sadly, on July 3, 1999, Sandman collapsed on the stage of the Nel Nome Del Rock festival at the Giardini del Principe in Palestrina, Italy, outside of Rome. He was soon pronounced dead of a heart attack and Morphine immediately disbanded.

WBUR has an excellent article about the impact of this seminal album that you can find here. The surviving members of Morphine joined up with singer/guitarist Jeremy Lyons to form Vapors of Morphine. The band continues to perform Morphine's body of work as well as originals. Definitely worth checking out!

Previous Episode

Royal Blood

This week we listen to and discuss one of Aaron's picks: English rock duo Royal Blood. Formed in Brighton in 2011, Royal Blood consists of Mike Kerr on vocals and bass and Ben Thatcher on drums. Their sound is anchored in Kerr's unique bass playing technique, in which he uses various effects pedals to make his electric bass sound like a standard electric guitar. Their self-titled debut album was released in August 2014. Their second album How Did We Get So Dark? followed in June 2017.

For this episode, we breakdown their eponymous debut album. Most of the album's songs revolve heavily around the riffs written and played by bassist Mike Kerr. The recording of the album was kept under strict conditions, with the band essentially recording the album with only Mike Kerr's vocals and bass guitar and Ben Thatcher's drum kit, with the exception of shakers and tambourines on some of the album's tracks. The production of the album did not involve the use of samples or overdubbing, which meant that most of the album's material was recorded in one take, thus producing a more natural sound as opposed to the popular method of recording various takes and combining them in the final mix.

Sit back and join us we discuss Royal Blood.

Next Episode

Mister Asylum

This week we continue our journey through Aaron's "laid back and heavy" motif with Highly Suspect.

Highly Suspect is an American rock band from Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The band consists of twin brothers Rich (bass guitar, backing vocals) and Ryan Meyer (drums, backing vocals), Johnny Stevens (guitar, lead vocals), and Matt Kofos (guitar, synthesizer, backing vocals). After starting as a bar cover band, they relocated to Brooklyn, New York, where they recorded The Worst Humans EP with producer Joel Hamilton.

The band's first studio album, Mister Asylum, was released on July 17, 2015, earning Highly Suspect a nomination for Best Rock Album at the 58th Annual Grammy Awards. It's that album we take a dive into this week. Mister Asylum debuted at No. 56 on Billboard 200, and No. 7 on the Top Rock Albums chart, selling 4,000 copies in its first week. Although not as obscure as some of the albums we discuss, the grungy hard rock of Mister Asylum shares the same DNA as albums from Royal Blood, cleopatrick and The Fairview.

You can check out their music video for Lydia here!