Hailing from Saint-Petersburg, The Grand Astoria is a Russian rock outfit that combines a stoner aesthetic with progressive fundamentals to great effect. Or was it a progressive aesthetic with stoner fundamentals? In either case, their opus The Mighty Few is a paradoxically easy and challenging listen. No, I'm not just speaking in riddles for the sake of pretentious pseudo-intellectualism. I get enough of that from college freshmen trying to debate continental philosophy. Allow me to explain what I mean.
You may have noticed that the embedded track is a full twenty-eight minutes and nineteen seconds in length. No, your eyes aren't deceiving you. Yes, that's the first track of the album. The Mighty Few is a full-length album (actually a fairly long one at nearly fifty minutes), but has a mere two tracks. Furthermore, these tracks are repetitive enough that listening to them all the way through isn't an easy task for the ADHD music fan. It's also somewhat difficult to just allot twenty-plus minutes of your time to listening to a single song. That's what I mean by The Mighty Few being a challenging listen.
On the other hand, the actual music being played here is extremely accessible (despite its format). The Grand Astoria play a hypnotic blend of stoner rock, jazz, progressive rock and classic metal. To quote the blog Heavy Metal Textbooks, "if Pink Floyd and The Mars Volta had a baby, and that baby grew up listening to heavy metal and punk, and then formed a rock band, that band would be The Grand Astoria." It's a bit of a roundabout description, but roundabout descriptions seem oddly apt when talking about music of this sort. My advice would be to listen to the first few minutes of the second track, The Siege, to see if this album is right for you. Opener Curse of the Ninth takes a good two minutes of tease and build before the distortion kicks in, while The Siege fires on all cylinders right out of the gate. Either way, they're both great songs. You have excellent vocal harmonies and glorious walls of fuzz juxtaposed with subdued psychedelia and restrained classical elements, and the end product is a quite compelling (if arguably overlong) slab of music. Give it a spin; for twenty-plus minute songs, they're quite addictive.
Guitarman out.
