The Night is the fifth and final studio album by the alternative rock band Morphine, released in 2000 via DreamWorks.[1][2] The album expands the band's sound beyond their usual arrangements of previous albums (bass, saxophone and drums), introducing acoustic guitars, organs, strings and female backing vocals.[3]
Jerome Deupree, the band's original drummer, who had previously quit due to health problems, rejoined and played alongside Billy Conway, according to credits listed in the CD booklet.[5]The Night was thus Morphine's first album recorded as a quartet rather than a trio.[6][7]
The band recorded the album over two years[7] in the Cambridge, Massachusetts, home studio of singer-bassist Mark Sandman.[3][8] Several guest musicians appeared, most of whom were associated with the improvising ensemble Club d'Elf with whom Sandman collaborated occasionally in the late 1990s.[9]
Recording sessions for the album were completed shortly before Sandman's sudden July 1999 death. Sandman and saxophonist Dana Colley oversaw the final mixing process.[10]
The Pitch wrote that "it’s not a romantic exaggeration to say that this album is the trio’s most sensuous, satisfying recording, finally delivering on the diverting-but-two-dimensional original notion of what Sandman termed 'low rock' ... The Night is the first time in ages a posthumous release has made noise from beyond the grave that doesn’t sound like a cash register."[19]Trouser Press wrote that "the tone may be dour due to the singer’s sudden death, but the music is the most fully realized and finely textured Morphine ever mustered."[10]Exclaim! called the album "a slow, grinding burlesque that hovers tentatively between testifying to above and wallowing down below."[20]
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