Near as I can tell, the plot in the lyrics of Evil Cosmonaut’s “Boris Yeltsin vs. Giant Ants” is that huge bugs come and attack the world. Buildings fall, people die, and then Boris Yeltsin shows up, does an evil dance, and saves the planet. I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you that’s fucking awesome. Much of the Moscow three-piece’s R.A.I.G. debut, We Have Landed, follows that kind of course – not always to such heights of badassery, but nonetheless with a notable degree of charm. “My Moustache” calls its titular subject, “My present from God,” and “Armageddon” playfully name-checks the stars of the 1998 blockbuster, even going so far as to mention Steve Buscemi. That, in combination with the clay artwork, the crunchy tone of guitarist/vocalist Alex “Kaza” Kazachev and the bluesy groove of “The Song We Will Never Play Again,” seems to make We Have Landed a record that gets by more on personality than innovation, but whatever does it does it. The album’s nine tracks and 42 minutes feel quick, songs vary enough to hold interest, and periodic bursts of punkish energy keep the pace from being mired by sleepy stonerisms. A mostly dry production keeps Evil Cosmonaut grounded from where some of the space-program thematics might otherwise take them, giving the album a garage-esque feel at times, but between Kazachev and bassist Denis “Memphis Dead” Petrov, the tones are thicker than most of what passes these days for that aesthetic. It’s all rock.

And if anything, it’s hard to pick a highlight from among We Have Landed’s fare. “Armageddon” certainly makes a case for itself, with its rudimentary chugging riff and live feel, as well as its lyrics, but “Old Guy Neil,” which recalls the moon landing and Neil Armstrong’s first steps out of the craft, starts the album off with a crisp (if somewhat misleading) aggressive bent and foretells a lot of the perspective to come. Drummer Konstantin Sosnin, the only member of Evil Cosmonaut without a nickname, is straightforward in his approach and well-suited to Kazachev’s riffs, which for the most part lead the way. The upbeat shuffle of “Marvin” – either an inside joke or a reference I don’t get to an old man who lives in a cave – features some of We Have Landed’s best fuzz, to be later complemented by closer “The Golden Apples of the Sun,” and maintains the forward motion of the opener, leading to the even more rocking “Big Super Mega Monsters,” which earns its chorus shout of the title line late in the track. The song can’t help but be memorable with a name like that, but the music stands up to it with a marked simplicity of approach and a cheeky self-awareness that matches Kazachev’s vocal. However simple the album might seem, Evil Cosmonaut have a clear mindfulness of structure, as “The Song We Will Never Play Again” shows by slowing down the momentum of “Big Super Mega Monsters” and giving way in turn to the middle-pacing of “Armageddon.” Given the tongue-in-cheek nature of most of the lyrics – here a drunken alien abduction is recounted – I’d doubt the veracity of the title “The Song We Will Never Play Again,” or at least hope it’s not true, since the song’s relatively lumbering groove is among the album’s most fascinating assets.

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If it feels like there’s been a lot of instrumental heavy psych reviewed around here lately, you’re right. Joining the pack with their second studio full-length on R.A.I.G. (they also had a live album out) is previously On-the-Radar’ed Moscow trio The Re-Stoned, whose latest seven-track collection of wah-jam voodoo is called Analog. A lot of what you need to know about the band and the album is right there. As their moniker might lead you to believe, they’re stoned again – playing a kind of heady guitar-led stoner/psych rock – and they’re not at all shy about highlighting the analog warmth of the cuts included; calling it Analog feels almost brazen, daring the listener to take on the album’s natural feel. And in so doing, one is making a considerable investment in both time and energy. The three-piece cover a wide swath of mostly familiar ground on Analog, and with opener “Northern Lights” as the shortest piece at 5:58 and closer “Dream of Vodyanoy” the longest at 14:01, the record clocks a robust 61 and a half minutes, which is a lot and feels like it.

Immediately that’s a kind of drawback for The Re-Stoned. “Fronted” in a musical sense by heavily-effected, Orange-amped guitarist Ilya Lipkin, Analog takes shape around classic psych jams like “Crystals,” and while the bluesy favor in Lipkin’s playing is often satisfying as offset by the double-Vladimir rhythm section of Vladimir Nikulin (bass) and Vladimir Muchnov (drums), as “Crystals” turns into “Feedback” turns into “Music for Jimmy” and the album’s middle becomes its end, the course of jam parts, the occasional plotted riff and extended solos starts to feel samey, in concept if not actual sound. The Re-Stoned recorded Analog live, which was undoubtedly the way to go considering the spontaneous vibe of the material, and in multiple sessions, and one can hear that mostly in Muchnov’s drums, which have an entirely different snare sound on the title-track than they do on the riffier “Put the Sound Down or Get the Hell Out.” And while this change in the actual audio keeps Analog from sounding overly redundant, there’s no denying the ethic is the same. That said, “Analog” blends the more riff-led and jammier elements in The Re-Stoned’s approach better than nearly everything else on the album, so it’s not like Analog is lacking in satisfying moments or is somehow entirely without merit or appeal. Just the opposite.

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Though both their band moniker and album title smack of grindcore or some form of metal more typically thought of as “extreme,” Moscow outfit Without God’s debut, Lambs to the Slaughter, is doom and sludge the whole way through. The first offering from the four-piece (who may or may not have gotten their name from the Katatonia song), Lambs to the Slaughter finds its release through R.A.I.G., perhaps the most major of players in the still-developing Russian heavy/riff-led scene – that’s not to say “stoner,” because it’s not all stoner rock, though those elements are present in many of R.A.I.G.’s bands (The Re-Stoned and The Grand Astoria come to mind), Without God among them. But the 10 cuts on Lambs to the Slaughter are darker, more doomed atmospherically, and among the band’s influences — readily on display in various stretches throughout the album – the Californian desert is all but completely inconsequential. Without God are shooting for something altogether more tonally weighted, and about as close as they come is some similarity early on between vocalist/guitarist Anton Brovkin and former The Awesome Machine singer John Hermansen’s guttural croon on opener “They Rot.”

I’d chalk that up to coincidence more than influence, and rather, it seems the actual intent of Without God is to play off a Crowbar-style riffy sludge, throw in some melody – as both Brovkin and fellow guitarist Olga Grieg do effectively in the instrumental breaks of “They Rot” – and write traditionally structured heavy songs. Noble enough intent, and they’re not bad at it. Small flourishes of individuality go a long way toward complementing the more genre-based ideas on Lambs to the Slaughter, and a string of slower, bluesy guitar leads across several of the tracks — “Believe,” “Crossroads/Eat the Shit,” “Forgiveness Sunday,” “Altar of Medicine,” and closer “Faithless” – shows personality in the playing that’s still only beginning to emerge. Crowbar is the chief influence on much of Lambs to the Slaughter, whether it’s a slower song like “Altar of Medicine” or a faster one like “Homeless,” but they’re by no means the only point of inspiration on display. Brovkin’s vocal cadence on the awesomely-named “Space Weed” is pure Lee Dorrian from Cathedral’s classic “Hopkins (The Witchfinder General),” and you can’t get away with putting the exclamation “Alright now!” over a grooving riff as he does on “Believe” without earning a comparison to Sabbath’s “Sweet Leaf.” Especially not over that grooving riff.

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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.

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Not to be confused with an alternative rock band from San Francisco, the Sex Type Thing in question hail from Saint Petersburg (much different), in Russia, and play a straightforward type of heavy/stoner rock that they adopted in 2007 after years of development, lineup and style changes. Their first album, Southern Dreams from Northern Reality, came out in 2009, and in March, they’ll follow it with Checked up by Time, snippets from which are available for listening on the Bandcamp player below.

I suppose one doesn’t name a band after a Stone Temple Pilots song and not have some measure of ’90s commercial rock influence, but for anyone who’d care to visit their MySpace to hear tracks off the first album, Sex Type Thing filter any grunge leanings through a riff-heavy approach that’s aiming for something different entirely. The vocals of Michael Chigidin come across a little too forward in the mix on the older material — “Long Way Home Blues” and “Freeway Ride,” for example — but judging by the snippets, that seems to have been at least somewhat taken care of on the new cuts. Hey, at least he can sing.

Straight-ahead European-style stoner rock is nothing new by this point, but Russia‘s burgeoning scene (bands like The Re-Stoned and The Grand Astoria) is only now starting to make itself known internationally, so it’s worth a look and listen to acts like Sex Type Thing to hear what kind of influences are at work. Or, if you’d rather just groove on it, that’s fine too.

With their origins in the chilly Russian climes of Saint Petersburg, The Grand Astoria are bound to bring something unique to their take on stoner rock, and sure enough, with their appropriately-titled second offering, II (R.A.I.G.), they do just that, eschewing a fuzzy sound for a harsher, noisier distorted jamming that occasionally goes full-cosmic. While some of the material on last year’s self-released self-titled effort seemed punkish, II comes from a less hurried place and shows The Grand Astoria as unafraid to experiment within their sound, adding samples or feedback to the mostly instrumental material as a way of engaging their audience.

Immediately noticeable about II is the way it’s organized. In terms of track length, the five songs that comprise the album would make a ‘U’ were you to graph them. Opener “Enjoy the View” reaches furthest at 14:50, then the cumbersomely-named “The Inner Galactic Experience of Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath” (Plath was referenced on the self-titled as well) clocks in at 7:40. “Visit Sri Lanka” gives a Siena Root-esque moment of Subcontinental Asian influence at 2:44, then it’s back to the longer material with “Wikipedia Surfer” at 9:02 and closer “Radio Friendly Fire” at 12:18. What was behind The Grand Astoria arranging the tracks this way I don’t know, but II does have a rich and smooth flow to it and “Visit Sri Lanka” breaks up the surrounding tracks in a way as to make the second half of the album as refreshing as the first, so no complaints.

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On one of these endless summer days, nothing fits the bill quite like good old fashioned stoner rock, and if anyone knows about beating the heat, it’s The Re-Stoned, who come to us all the way from — MOSCOW? Okay, so maybe they’re not much for sunshine, but damn if they haven’t learned the lessons Karma to Burn and Fu Manchu have been teaching. Right on.

The trio are entirely instrumental, and guitarist Ilya Lipkin likes to experiment with effects, so some of that bleeds into the songs (a couple of which you can hear on The Re-Stoned‘s MySpace page), but there’s a lot here that’s just straight up fuzzriffic — so much so, in fact, The Re-Stoned even have their own custom distortion pedal. You know that’s damn fuzzy.

Hard not to dig the wah-bass Vladimir Nikulin provides on “Return,” and I don’t know what the groove of “Mountain Giant” is In Search Of, but I’m pretty sure it found it. They’ve also got a live jam posted that’s pretty tasty, and a mellower cut called “Sleeping World” where they let their inner “Planet Caravan” shine. The three studio tracks come off 2009′s Return of the Reptiles EP (R.A.I.G.), but they’ll be featured on the forthcoming Revealed Gravitation full-length as well, which is expected out soon.

I know I say it all the time, but it just goes to show how universal The Heavy really is. Kids in the desert can get down every bit as easily as kids in snowy Moscow, and on a sweltering day, all you have to do is fire up the intertubes and you’ve got a main line to yet another killer band. This is a wondrous age, my friends.

To anyone who’d argue that the “stoner” sound is belonging to any one region or locale — i.e. the Palm Desert in California or the Southern US — first, you’re just wrong, and second, take a look at an act like The Grand Astoria, who call St. Petersburg in Russia home. They bill themselves as a stoner punk band, and in their more active, upbeat material like “Evolution of the Planet Groove,” I can hear it especially in the vocals of guitarist Kamille Sharapodinov, whose singing style might seem awkward with the music until you recall how many stoner rockers are just punkers who grew up.

That said, of the tracks on their MySpace, I prefer the grander, more instrumental and jammy vibe of “The Man. The Sun. The Desert,” which, although not without its moments of hesitation, has a more graceful flow and when Sharapodinov does offer vocals, they’re more subdued. The build up on that track, bolstered by the guitar work of Igor Suvorov, the bass of Farid Azizov and Nick Kunavin‘s drumming, leads to more straightforward thrash riffing and screaming solos sure to satisfy anyone looking to add a little metal into the mix.

These multiple personalities play out even further on “The Art of Communication with Aliens,” which takes the riffing to yet another level of noisy crunching heaviness. Fortunately, for anyone who’d want to experience The Grand Astoria‘s self-titled, self-released album, they’ve made it available free of charge. I know I’ll be checking it out, as it’s always interesting to hear what those from another culture bring to an established sound — and since you don’t hear much about the Russian scene, it could be an eye-opening experience. Here’s looking forward.

As if it wasn’t well established by then, the poetry reading that shows up in “Mired” — track three of the total eight that make up Forest Stream’s sophomore outing, The Crown of Winter (Candlelight) — more or less confirms that, yes, you’re listening to Euro doom. But wait, there’s a twist! Forest Stream aren’t British or Scandinavian, they’re Russian! And if there’s one group of people on this planet who know about feeling cold and sad, it’s the Russians. So off we go.

The usual Euro doom elements show up — the distraught melodic vocals peppered with deathly growls, the extensive synth work, the pervading sense of misery, etc. — but Forest Stream temper this, as on “Bless You to Die” with a discernable Emperor influence, adding black metal grandiosity to their already complex approach. After “Intro,” the nearly 12-minute-long title track and the aforementioned “Mired,” it’s a welcome and somewhat unexpected change of pace. Another twist! It’s hardly M. Night Shyamalan, but hey, in a subgenre where aping Paradise Lost records from 18 years ago is the encouraged norm, any evolution is cool by me.

Forest Stream could easily open for Swallow the Sun with Katatonia headlining and I’d go see the tour. People would be cutting their wrists in the aisles and it would be a marvelous exercise in audio depression. The Crown of Winter achieves what must have been its desired aim — to both rock and bum out — and on a snowy day here in the valley, I’ve a hard time thinking of a more appropriate accompaniment to the scene outside the window, whereby the sun, struggling to shine through the cloud cover, has at last failed and relinquished the day to the ensuing precipitation. So it goes.

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