A couple years back, my friend Lucy was introducing Morphine for a local radio station's concert series. Her boss asked her to keep an eye on the band's tour bus while they finished the encore and signed autographs. As eyes are known to wander, hers happened to rest on a bag of mini-Krackles. The allure of Hershey's rip-off of the Nestlé Crunch bar was distracting enough that she failed to notice more important things-- like the fact that Morphine had returned to their bus, effectively catching her crunching hot chocolate and clenching the rest of the candy behind her back. To distract The Sandman, Lucy started to apologize for the aggressive hecklers in the crowd that had pestered all three bands and event staff that evening.

But all it took was the word "heckler." The Sandman immediately began talking about Steve Martin's role in "The Jerk." Mark looked distant, though there was a confidence in his dry but dreamy voice when he called Steve Martin "the hero of all hecklers." According to Sandman, "a heckler isn't lazy," and, "a heckler is your best friend." "A heckler has his eyes and ears all over you and will call you on it if you're weak. A good heckler in your audience will not only keep you on your toes but remind you why you are on stage at all." The Sandman thought if you couldn't put up with hecklers, you shouldn't be playing. Fortunatly, he liked hecklers more than he liked Hershey's, allowing Lucy a clean getaway with the chocolates.

So it only seems appropriate to keep heckling Morphine's singer and bassist Mark Sandman, who has been widely eulogized since he collapsed onstage just over a year ago. When we first heard the Sandman's two-string slide bass slinking with a steadily dark pulse beneath Dana Colley's expressive if sleazy sax, no one could deny that the Boston trio lurked in a place where creepy could be sexy. In the process, they developed an uncomfortably cool new sound.

During their tenure as jazz-rock saviors, Morphine's sticky blues-drenched elixir drew more of cult than a crowd. And as their last two releases lacked any coherence beyond the band's trademark mood, which had become somewhat predictable, they also avoided relevancy. It seemed that the majority of the people still listening were those inside the band's cult-like following who made Morphine an especially apt name for their fix. But hecklers are more critical than addicts, and those with the commitment to pester wanted more than Yes offered and panned Like Swimming.

While an answer to those heckler, Morphine's fifth album, The Night, still warrants a pesky jab or two. The recording, which Sandman produced, sounds fuller than its predecessors, incorporating strings, organ, and additional percussion. The album updates the trio's sound without the forced experimental quality of some of the weaker material on Yes or the unsuccessful lounge-pop sleeper, Like Swimming. The shift in tempo and variation of arrangements here (including backup singers) puts Morphine back on a track where people outside their immediate fanbase might start paying attention again.

But the lyrics leave you wishing Mark Sandman was still around to heckle. In "Souvenir," he reflects, "I remember meeting you, you were super low/ Surrounded by the sounds of saxophones." In "Top Floor, Bottom Buzzer" he tells us what we already knew-- that "Top floor, bottom buzzer" will inevitably lead to, "By the time Pricilla put the Al Green on/ The bottle was gone." The abstractions and attractions going up in flames and down in parachutes seem like Morphine's stock content served up with the smug laziness of a host passing around his blue-ribbon jailhouse chili for the third barbeque in a row. Song titles like "A Good Woman is Hard to Find" and "I'm Yours, You're Mine" don't surprise with shock, subtlety or extra garlic in the chili to fend off us hecklers who want to hear more than kidney beans in our low-register cult-rock.

-Kristin Sage Rockermann