SANDSTONE is a band that showed plenty of promise three years ago with their debut, which not only blurred the lines of hard and melodic rock superbly but it produced some tracks that must have given these Irish boys a big following on the Ireland live circuit, but now in 2009 we are presented with the latest release Purging The Past, which while it does have its moments it is not everything I hoped it would be.

Purging The Past is a 15 track album, running at just over an hour, which to be honest is far too much to digest in a sitting. I had to give this album a huge amount of listens to see if it was going to be one of those albums that you get more out of every time you listen to it…this is not one of those albums. What you are presented with is 4 ballads and 11 songs that try to cram so many different ideas and themes into one package that it's bloated and just feels like it is suffering from a lack of proper direction.

Some hugely talented guitarists are showing off their skills to the maximum on this record, whether it be the cool bass lines, sweeping and shredding guitar solos or the wonderful melodic guitar passages in the ballads, but all of this is lost under what appears to be a very forced song structure. Almost every song starts with a slow clean intro and then goes into a hard rock passage and just as you think the momentum has built enough and the song is going to explode, it drops back to the melodic or to a really slow section… kills the flow and pacing of the album.

This is the main problem, some great songs like the ballad Y and The Son Of Carthage, a track that sounds like DRAGONFORCE have been a massive influence on, really shine. Admittedly the first half of the album is boring at times and tiring which is a shame as the second half improves greatly. The band almost let their hair down in the second half and really blast out some good stuff but the first 6 songs just drag.
 
I think a general problem is that the singer tries to stretch his range far to wildly. His voice has an Axl Rose sound to it, which lends itself well to the clean and melodic sections, but when he is called upon to produce some power in his voice, it is lacking and wavers greatly in quality.

SANDSTONE have produced a difficult album to review, because I genuinely think the band, if they refined themselves a bit more, could be onto something good. Early IRON MAIDEN and GUNS 'N ROSES are clear influences and with the huge amount of talent in this band you would expect a clear direction to be taken with the band. The ballads while good, stick out from the rest of the tracks, which generally all take the same song writing structure. They would have benefited from maybe producing a 8 or 9 track album and getting to grips with those songs… instead of producing a full 15 songs that contains a few brilliant tracks, a lot of filler and not a whole lot else.