After releasing the well-received II last year through R.A.I.G., Russian genrenauts The Grand Astoria make a quick return with their third album, Omnipresence. Self-released and stretching to nearly a full-hour despite paring down song lengths from last time out, Omnipresence finds the St. Petersburg four-piece joined by a host of guests, paying tribute to Ray Bradbury (who shows up in the liner art), and managing at different times to play to their noisy strengths while also reaching beyond the limitations of stoner or heavy rock with funk and jam-based experimentation. Omnipresence has moments that work and moments that don’t, but as a band, The Grand Astoria are quickly growing into their sound, and their third offering documents that process well.

They’ve since lost their rhythm section, but guitarists Kamille Sharapodinov (also vocals) and Igor Suvorov are leading the charge on Omnipresence anyway, crisscrossing into and out of conventionality with ease unnerving for a band still so young, having just formed two years ago. Their restless nature shows off the bat with the stoner punk of opener “Doomsday Party,” in which Sharapodinov, Suvorov, then-bassist Farid Azizov and then-drummer Nick Kunavin are right in their element. Sharapodinov’s vocals on “Doomsday Party” and several of the more upbeat Omnipresence tracks remind of the blown-out feel Hank Williams III used on the earliest Assjack demos, but I’d imagine that’s more coincidence — and the effect is by no means exclusive to him, it’s just that with the quick tempo and punk feel, that’s what comes to my mind first. Azizov and Kunavin provide well-placed backing vocals on the opener and a few of the later tracks, including “Something Wicked This Way Comes” and “Rat Race in Moscow,” two of the strongest songs on the album.

At their strongest, The Grand Astoria bite off a piece of Fu Manchu’s hardcore roots and make it their own, and some of Omnipresence shows that. “Hungry and Foolish,” which follows “Doomsday Party,” has formidable and unabashed stoner rock groove, but some of the spacier ideas that came to the fore on II show themselves in the echoey instrumental “Omniabsence,” which follows “Mania Grandiosa” (probably Sharapodinov’s best vocal here) and sets up the centerpiece section of the album. Its hypnotic affect is considerable – a four-minute trip into an alternate sonic galaxy – but if anything is going to snap the listener back to awareness, it’s the catchy “Rat Race in Moscow.” The vocals are high in the mix (I always think that, so take it with a grain of salt), but if The Grand Astoria were ever right to want to feature the chorus, it’s here. The track opens with a big rock finish and gives perhaps a more playful take on some of the punk influence shown earlier on in Omnipresence’s starting moments.

But if “Rat Race in Moscow” is as forceful as The Grand Astoria get with their more straightforward material, the 12-minute “Something Wicked This Way Comes” (the aforementioned Bradbury tribute made aural flesh) shows them at their spaciest. Compared to what some of II had to offer, it’s still more concise stylistically than what the band has done, but an extended instrumental break in the middle with sampled speech – presumably from the 1983 film based on the book that shares the track’s name – and a few surprising guitar turns from Sharapodinov and Suvorov still drive it deeper into a less-structured presentation. To the band’s credit, in the closing section, they bring back the original chorus, as if to emphasize just how far you’ve come since the last time you heard it.

“The Song of Hope” features one of Omnipresence’s several guest keyboardists (also guest guitar and harmonica), and it probably as big a misstep as the band makes. The keys follow a choppy funk line and Kunavin seems to be steering the song in a jam-band direction, and on the whole, it left me cold. Entirely possible that’s because I just don’t like jam bands, but even so, it’s a bold step for The Grand Astoria to try branching out from their stoner and space influences. An instrumental (apart from more sampled vocals) title track brings back the spacier feel of its companion piece – so on the album we have “Omniabsence” meeting “Omnipresence,” playing off each other with a few songs between them. The latter is somewhat more grounded, if only for the samples, and sets up closer “Stonewall” to finish Omnipresence with surprisingly metal (and effective) riffage and more guest keys. I hate to say definitively one way or the other, but with no less than four guest keyboardists, the moment may have arrived for The Grand Astoria to think about hiring someone full time.

And if they’re going to, they better do it quick if they want to keep up the considerable pacing of their releases. Either way, with a new drummer and bass player in the fold, and with Sharapodinov and Suvorov’s expanding creative will, we’re bound to get something different out of The Grand Astoria next time around. For now, it’s reassuring to hear them become aware of what they’re best at, and as the growing Russian scene continues to take shape and gain international attention (see also Greece and Poland), it will be exciting to discover along with the band the individual spin they’re going to put on the well-established genre conceits. That process has already started, and anyone wishing to get on board with it will find Omnipresence an excellent avenue for doing so.

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Tags: Russia, St. Petersburg, The Grand Astoria, Unsigned bands

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 9th, 2011 at 6:27 pm and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.