Morphine make mood music, and the mood is definitely noir. The blue haze hangs over not only their songs' scenarios – with their temptresses and telling glances – but also the stripped-down instrumentation: bass, drums and baritone sax, fronted by songwriter Mark Sandman's weary baritone vocals. On "Thursday," the single from Cure for Pain (1993), he laid down a hard-boiled narrative replete with motel trysts and pool-hall rendezvous. On "Whisper," from the new Yes, Sandman lures a woman with silence ("I know it drives you crazy when I pretend you don't exist"). It's typical of the band to take a four-bar stop while Sandman delivers a deadpan pronouncement: "If I'm guilty, so are you/It was March 4, 1982."

Sandman's hipster pose may be a gimmick, but it's of a piece with the band's music, whose propulsive whomp hinges on dynamics and groove, on the rush of swirling saxophone and bass lines that fill those white-space silences. The sliding pitches of Sandman's two-string slide bass (another gimmick that isn't) often sing the melody line along with the vocals and Dana Colley's sax. On "Radar" the bass lines threaten to jump right out of the mix. Meanwhile, drummer Billy Conway has a loose-wristed command that contributes to the band's now-you-see-it-now-you-don't grasp of the downbeat.

At times, everything in Morphine sounds like it's playing the rhythm – the intertwining sax and bass lines, the lyrics' syllabic pop, not to mention Conway's well-placed kick-drum bombs. Such derring-do has turned this 5-year-old guitarless Boston trio into an unlikely club champ. It also doesn't hurt that both sax and bass can kick up plenty of guitarlike noise. For all their sultriness, Morphine do rock out, and like the best jazz, they swing at any tempo. (RS 704)

JON GARELICK