Country: USA
Genre: progressive rock, space rock, stoner rock, psychedelic rock
Year: 2009
Label: Rise Above Records
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Review: Astra are a band in love with the ‘70s, and they seem pretty unapologetic about it. They get right to it on The Weirding, their debut album. “The Rising of the Black Sun” is a five-minute, forty-five-second instrumental that sets the stage for the rest of this sprawling, 79-minute disc. Starting with tinkling bells, fluttering flutes, and spare guitar and keyboard notes, the song eventually blossoms into a driving proto-metal guitar duet that recalls Black Sabbath and Deep Purple. From there the band slides right into the title track, all 15 minutes of it. More flute and cymbal-heavy drumming accompany vocals that sing about well, a world’s end scenario, “the weirding of the wicked world”. This track, like most of the others on the album, is heavy on guitars and analog synthesizers. At some points in “The Weirding”, the guitars and synths combine to sound remarkably like The Mars Volta’s guitar-saxophone doubling technique, but that may be the only nod, intentional or not, to the present.
Astra end up with a middling first album. The engineering on The Weirding isn’t stellar, but that’s not the problem. The disc sounds like it was recorded in a garage, which it probably was, but that sort of adds to the whole ‘70s atmosphere of the music. Clearly the band is doing exactly what they want, but what they really need next time out is a producer who can step in and convince them that some songs might turn out better if they were 10 minutes long instead of 15. Some gentle editing might have done a lot to help The Weirding‘s overall quality level. By Chris Conaton.
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