Vapors of Morphine keeps evolving while paying homage to past
At a Morphine tour stop in New Orleans during the ’90s, sax player Dana Colley snapped a Polaroid of a busking Jeremy Lyons and tossed it in his guitar case. Years later, finding himself displaced by Hurricane Katrina, Lyons landed in Cambridge, where he started jamming with Colley.
The serendipity of it all is something to marvel at. But it’s just a start. Not only did the two discover they had crossed paths years ago, but they uncovered a deep musician connection that blossomed into Vapors of Morphine.
“We’re the best of friends and he’s an amazing musician, really under-rated and one of a kind,” Colley said.
While Lyons has his own distinct style, he can dig into the low rock vibe of late-Morphine leader Mark Sandman like no one else. Vapors of Morphine’s latest single, “Irene,” could have been slipped onto “Cure for Pain” between “All Wrong” and “Candy.” And yet other tracks on Vapors’ new LP, “Fear & Fantasy,” out today, push low rock into new places. There’s the New Orleans swamp boogie of “Dropout Mambo,” the Delta blues of “Frankie & Johnny,” a cover of Ali Farka Toure’s “Lasidan” that feels like a glorious fever dream.
“Having done so many nights at the (Cambridge club) Atwood’s residency, we’ve had a lot of freedom to jam or come up with stuff that’s structured or just off the top of our heads,” Colley said. “It’s been a great creative laboratory. So the record is a combination of all the things we’ve been trying. I’ve always wanted to keep the Morphine material alive and have a way to do that that is true to our original intentions. So we start there and then create in the moment.”
One of the wonderful things about staying true to the intentions of Morphine is that the Cambridge champs always traveled across a huge sonic sweep (go back and take note of the huge aesthetic chasm between “Honey White” and “Take Me With You”). “Fear & Fantasy” achieves its goals by accident and intention. Original drummer Jerome Deupree amicably split with the band halfway through the record to be replaced by Tom Arey so the album has a “Jerome Side” that feels a bit more like classic Morphine and a “Tom Side” with a slightly more bluesy approach; the band wrote new material for the album and resurrected a pair of older tracks.
“‘Golden Hour’ I wrote with (Morphine followup band) Twinmen, but it was extremely obscure because I lowered the vocals down so it was unintelligible and sounded like Barry White,” Colley said. “It was written after Mark died. … I always feel like the first recording
of it wasn’t right.”
Now, “Golden Hour,” a slow jazz shuffle through a hazy twilight, represents the distinctive touch that has passed from Colley’s old band to Vapors. It’s a wonderful
eulogy to the lost legend and an example of how the trio keeps reinventing itself.