The Night is Morphine's fifth and final studio album, released on DreamWorks Records in 2000, a year after the death of founder Mark Sandman, who collapsed on stage during a concert in Palestrina, Italy on July 3, 1999. The album had been largely completed before Sandman's death, with the trio of Sandman on two-string slide bass and vocals, Dana Colley on baritone and tenor saxophones, and Billy Conway on drums. The title is fitting for a band whose music always inhabited a nocturnal, after-hours atmosphere, and the album finds Morphine at their most atmospheric. "The Night," "Slow Numbers," and "Souvenir" feature Colley's saxophone in both accompaniment and solo roles, maintaining the band's signature sound of baritone saxophone functioning as a lead instrument in place of guitar. The production, by Sandman and the band, retains the intimate, low-end-heavy sonic character that defined all of Morphine's recordings. Released posthumously as a final document of the band's work, The Night carries an inevitable weight of elegy, though the music was not conceived with that intent. It serves as both a conclusion to Morphine's discography and a reminder of the singular sound they created — a trio format in which saxophone, slide bass, and drums produced something no other band replicated.
