Morphine

Few bands in alt-rock made such a lasting impression using so little — minimal, guitar-less instrumentation behind spare, sleepy-eyed songs that, for all intents and purposes, were drugs themselves. The group's best tracks sound as fresh and wholly original today as the day they were cut. Ease back, cue "Honey White" and "Sheila," and see what we mean.

Anyone who knows Morphine knows that the group was never about hit singles. Their popularity grew with each album due to the quality of those albums: Good, Cure for Pain, and Yes, for starters. The shimmering hallucination that is "You Look Like Rain" and the haunting Easternisms igniting "Rope On Fire" — it's tracks like these that built albums like those.

Morphine addicts, you're blessed with the group's staggering collection of live tracks, not to mention B-sides, rarities, and outtakes. This being the Deep Cuts dept., we're padding out the heartbreak of "Gone for Good" with vault goodies like "Pulled Over the Car" and a live-in-Detroit take on "Cure for Pain" that'll make you rail at the gods for not being there.

There was nothing typical about Morphine. Not the trio's instrumentation: merely vocals, two-stringed bass, sax, and drums. And certainly not its late-night, narcotic groove laced with wry storytelling, courtesy of frontman Mark Sandman. From the Boston outfit's 1990 inception to their 1999 demise, when Sandman died of a heart attack onstage in Rome, Morphine turned out five studio albums that saw the band rise from cult curiosity to major-label artist — without ever losing the detached cool that made them one of the greats.