Critical reception
| Review scores | |
|---|---|
| Source | Rating |
| AllMusic |   [1] |
| Rolling Stone |  [2] |
| Stafford Post | [3] |
Grand Opening was widely praised by music critics and scholars. Rolling Stone 's review of Grand Opening stated that "The duo's classical and jazz backgrounds prop up songs whose structural inventiveness rewards saturation listening after the first delightful surprise…a debut that creates its own aural planet. Positively surreal." [4] Billboard music critic Timothy White was similarly effusive: "...the beguiling music is wiser than the accumulation of its quasi-whimsical ingredients. The material gleams with a wacky-brilliant tenderness, appreciative of the subtle human tension between observation and impulse. And no matter how haphazard they might seem, each of the 15 tracks on Grand Opening has a sleek, pointy groove, hitching the melody to one's psyche with the keen handiness of a hat pin...Grand Opening...defies every structural statute in the rock bylaws, doling out precise harmonies, static-stuttered atonal bleats, old-school hip-hop time signatures and square-dancing breakdowns, plus jazz-pop bouquets of soda bottle trumpets, dulcimers, steel drums, pounded tabletops, and non-sequitur background discussions." [5] Jon Pareles in the New York Times noted that "the band uses the repetition that's at the core of funk, but its songs free-associate with the capriciousness of dreams. The riffs migrate among instruments as the songs mutate from style to style: slow and midtempo funk, hard rock, Brazilian pop and Congolese-pygmy vocal hoots and syncopations." [6]