Goya – Harvester of Bongloads (Review)

Goya are a doom metal band from the US and this is their third album.

Here we have 40 minutes of blissfully hypnotic stoner doom metal, replete with grand fuzzy riffs, psychedelic noodling and more dark, hazy atmosphere than you can shake a bong at.

Harvester of Bongloads is full of doom, despair, epic downer metal and loose, bluesy jams. The album contains, in essence, two songs. The first is 20 minutes long, while the second is about the same, but distributed over three individual tracks.

Goya manage to pay ample homage to the forefathers of this kind of music, while also imprinting the tracks with their own take on the style to avoid sounding completely derivative.

There seems to be a healthy distrust and misanthropy in these songs that you sometimes don’t get from such bong-soaked music. A firm aura of misery permeates the heady vibes that the music gives off, lending a harder than average edge to the band’s output.

The singer’s strong voice carries real weight and tends to cut across the lazy, languid music with ease. Not that he’s overly aggressive or anything like that; his voice is of the style and fits the music well, but it has a very forceful, powerful quality that definitely makes its presence known in no uncertain terms. It provides the largely meandering, sluggish music a focus point to coalesce around, enhancing the songs as a whole.

I suppose that anyone who remains unconvinced by this kind of monolithic stoner doom will find little to convert them to the cause here, which is a real shame as Harvester of Bongloads, despite the slightly dodgy title, has a lot of depth, maturity and quality content on it. Black Sabbath, Electric Wizard and Sleep are the obvious references here…fans of these bands should lap up what Goya do, especially as they do it so well.

A recommended listen for any doomhead.