Silence. Close-up: A man's shaky hand holds a burning cigarette and rummages through a battered box of cassettes and other junk on the front seat of a parked car. As he pops a tape into the player, the car surges ahead and the camera draws back just enough to show that there are two men in the front seat. Morphine's tune, ""Radar,"" explodes. Opening credits roll.
If Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassidy had taken to the road in the '90s, the cassette they'd flip into the car stereo in some hot young director's era-defining film, ""Generation Beat,"" would be Morphine's ""YES.""
That wouldn't be the first Morphine tune used on a soundtrack. Five songs from their last record, ""CURE FOR PAIN,"" were chosen for the film, ""Spanking The Monkey."" Morphine have caused a commotion because they achieve the impossible: they make rock music without guitars. Nowhere, nohow, none. With a low-fi combo of bass, sax, & drums, Morphine bends the Beat-era's free jazz--too esoteric to stir a rocker's primitive impulses--and the gut-grabbing languor of the blues--too humble for a true rock bad-ass--into something that slithers and slides, soars and dips, grooves, proves, and ROCKS!
The Boston-based power trio succeed in their implausible breed of rock by coaxing their instruments into a game of musical role reversal. When their new album, ""YES,"" opens with the road-tripping boogie of the record's first single, ""Honey White,"" Dana Colley's in-your-face sax plays the part of the guitar, creating the melody, setting the tempo, and pitching the riffs. Up next, Mark Sandman's two-string slide bass joins him on the full-tilt boogie of ""Scratch,"" eking out the song's rollicking beat in a way usually reserved for drums. As drummer Billy Conway selflessly drops behind the beat in all the right places and Sandman croons his hard-luck groove (""I lost everything I had/I'm startin' over from scratch""), you can almost see a row of bluesmeisters dipping their horns and coming up for air in unison.
Lead singer and songwriter Sandman specializes in calling stilted communication on the carpet and turning the impasse into pithy, euphemistic one-liners. His voice, kind of a more throaty, less precise Evan Dando, is the perfect vehicle for his oozy, gin-soaked lyrics. As the bass line circles his taunts on my personal favorite, the noir-ish ""Whisper,"" he mimics the cat-and-mouse game (""Don't worry I'm not looking at you/gorgeous dressed in blue""). He trivializes our need--and perhaps his--to do something with our lives in title track ""Yes,"" chanting, ""Get in your go-cart and go, little sister."" Stubbornness is his target in ""All Your Way"" (""On my dyin' day/I might be able to say/You know I finally see things all your way"").
The record peters out a little on the second half, losing some of the brittle that makes it a rock record instead of a more standard-issue beat-jazz backdrop to a Langston Hughes recital. But the brilliant first six tracks make it all worthwhile. It's no accident that Sandman co-produced this record with Paul Q. Kolderie, whose other credits include Hole, Radiohead and Dinosaur Jr.
In a cheeky surprise ending, Sandman finally brings out the guitar. A quiet little finger pickin' number about closing doors on a lost love, Morphine seems to be telling us that they know who their pappy is, but they choose to do things their own way.
