Cool cats

Morphine's new album says yes to everything

by Gary Susman

The blues, according to more than one legend, are about mastery and prowess, especially sexual prowess. I'm a 60-minute man. I'm a back-door man. I'm a hootchy-kootchy man. I walked 47 miles of barbed wire; now tell me, who do you love? Why does Robert Johnson have such big hands? (It ain't just for fast finger work on the guitar, baby.) Why does a dog lick himself down there? Because he can.

Maybe Morphine's new album, yes (Rykodisc), should have been called, "Yes, We Can." Everything on the album is a sly boast. (Hell, after nerves and attrition left them the only band standing and gigging during a Los Angeles engagement the night after last winter's earthquake, they're entitled to brag.) Whatever it is, the trio want you to know they can do it, whether it's creating a full sonic palette without a guitar, or Dana Colley blowing baritone and tenor sax simultaneously on two tracks, or Mark Sandman getting by with just two strings on his bass, or drummer Billy Conway driving you wild with anticipation by dropping out for a few bars, or Sandman's deadpan baritone, voice, dripping with cool and sharp like an icicle, insinuating everything but too slippery to pin down. They do it because they can. "You want a super ultra maxi funky American love baby?" Sandman asks on "Super Sex," to no one in particular. "I got it all year long, ha ha."

Morphine are what Tom Waits would sound like with the rasp and rough edges slicked and smoothed out, as if that bard of the whiskey bottle were a lot less Charles Bukowski and Kurt Weill and a lot more Fats Waller and Allen Ginsberg. Morphine are smoky jazz clubs of the '40s, where dark-suited men and Dior-gowned dames pass notes to the cigarette girl, or of the '50s, where angry hipster prophets fog the air with poetry raining down like mustard gas -- but it's got a good beat and you can dance to it. Morphine are film noir, as experienced from a careering shuttle on the Universal Studio Tour. Morphine are fun -- when Sandman drawls "Yes/Yes/ Yes/Yes" on the title track, he evokes Molly Bloom's erotic reverie -- but they're never so emotional that they relinquish control, or their sense of detached irony. (Hey, it's the '90s. You can't expect them to approach the retro-chic vibe with a straight face.)

The album's sensuality level kicks into overdrive from the very first number, "Honey White," and that one isn't even about sex, per se, but about food. As Conway and Colley tear it up, with booming kickdrums and baritone sax lines so fat and beefy you could bite into them and feel the juices dribbling down your chin, Sandman croons a cautionary tale of a woman willing to deal with the devil for some angel food. Still, you can guess what wavelength Mephistopheles is really on when he croaks, "I like to see a little more fat."

That kind of oblique double entendre is typical. As florid as the instrumental arrangements are, Sandman's lyrics are more pared down and simplified than ever. He can get a rise (and even a chill) out of a line like "You penetrate my radar" (on "Radar"), or by discreetly cataloguing the caresses that will be missed now that a lover is "Gone for Good." On the refrain of "All Your Way," when he sings, "I finally see things all your way," it sounds as if he were acquiescing, but if you listen more closely, he's only suggesting that maybe someday he'll be willing to say that. As he sings in the ominous "Free Love," "Don't bank on it, baby."

This subtlety serves him well when he tries to add an air of menace to the songs' sexual tension. Whereas on "Thursday" (from the previous album, 1993's Cure for Pain), Sandman spun a tale of adulterous trysting in motels and poolhalls, he now needs mention only whiskey and cigarettes (on "Super Sex") and let Colley do the rest, using a garish, blaring, bleating sax riff to paint a picture of a flophouse lit by winking neon. Sandman feels comfortable using such words as "rapport" in a seduction song like "Whisper," oozing sophistication that he barely tried to summon in the days when he was fronting Treat Her Right and howling "Ah think she likes me, that's whut ah think," like the tongue-wagging wolf in the Tex Avery cartoons.

The production, by Paul Kolderie and Sandman, hews closely to the band's ferocious live sound -- which is not surprising, since listeners in Boston and elsewhere have been hearing these songs for the last several months of Morphine's relentless gigging. Even with such lo-fi antics as Sandman barking "Sharks Patrol These Waters" through an ancient taxi dispatcher's microphone, Morphine prove they can create a rich, ambient sound, just as they can do anything else they please. Damn them.