Released five years after the death of Mark Sandman, this collection provides two CDs’ worth of unreleased music by the Morphine front-man, along with a DVD compiling video footage of his performance in that and other bands.  While Morphine’s usual line-up consisted of saxophone(s), drums, and slide bass, the songs of Sandbox expand from that jazz rock base into additional instrumentation, including electric and acoustic guitars, piano, banjo, more percussives, horns, and so on, while maintaining the sly humor and dark-toned romanticism associated with the singer.

While there might be an impression of these tracks (thirty-one in all) being material that was waiting for Morphine’s next album to see release, they’re identified by the liner notes as having been pulled from the archives of recordings throughout his career, dating back to the ‘80s.  As such, production on all is fully finished, but the steady sense of character clarity to the music becomes even more impressive in that light.  The particulars change, but there’s no real point at which Sandman seems to be out of his element, even when singing in Spanish (”Hombre”) or doing a disco pastiche (”Deep Six”). 

As a posthumous celebration of his life and work, the collection does a fine job, showing how much more quality music Sandman had created and packed away as odds and ends.  Subsequent collections were apparently planned, but only one of them (At Your Service) was released before issues with Rykodisc put an indefinite hold on the emergence of any others.  For fans of Morphine and Sandman’s other bands, the material on display here is sure to be a welcome cache, showing off facets of his style that went underexposed (or completely unaddressed) on their studio albums.