Goya - Harvester of Bongloads (2017)
Here at TBB, we've been digging on
Goya's releases since the days of their demo, so to say that
anticipation has been high for this new album would be a bit of an
understatement. Hearing them grow through their split with Wounded
Giant, assorted singles and EPs, and the mammoth concept album of
Obelisk (still hungering for
a reissue of 777,
guys!), I was curious to hear how they'd top previous efforts, and I
was not disappointed.
Harvester of Bongloads
opens with the three-part, twenty-minute “Omen” (which'll take up
the whole A-side on vinyl copies), a shape-changing monster of doom,
passing through raging assaults, withdrawn reflections, savory riffs,
and flirtations with unhinged outpourings. Trying to assign too many
specifics to it would just be underselling the song, so I've got to
resort to simply saying 'hear it on your own, then listen to it
again.' There's a real sense of Goya's song-writing maturation here;
while they've capably wrangled big tracks before (go back and listen
to “No Place in the Sky” again if it's managed to slip your
memory), weaving the moods and sections together as they do here shows them driving to a new level, and imagining what it would be like to hear it played live has my head spinning in overload.
In the
second half, “Germination” provides a brief set-up of doom in a
more feedback-loaded vein, before “Misanthropy on High” swings in
on a sustain transition to snarl and spit its back-broken sense of
weight and pain. It's like hearing sludge's rawest attitude
channeled through doom metal arrangements, and the band makes that
fusion fucking glow like a black-light poster seen through mushroomed
eyes. The slide into melancholy, almost poignant chording around the
two-thirds mark only adds to the feeling that Goya are pushing
themselves past the point of familiar comforts in crafting their
songs, and if I ever wore a hat, it'd be snapped right off to them
for that work.
With “Disease”, the last track of the album, they spin those
efforts into some of the album's meanest-sounding material, embracing
the sludge-via-doom dynamic in all its violent grandeur, and churning
to its disintegrating finish with loads of style. It's one Hell of an
album, in short, with Goya utterly rejecting the impulse to rehash
old territory that claims and drags down so many promising doom
bands. Their stars are burning bright and hot, and if doom that
doesn't play it safe intrigues you, you need to get yourself a copy
of this as soon as possible (official release date's March 3rd,
so mark your calendar!).
~
Gabriel
For
Fans Of; Bitchcraft, Bomg, Dopelord, Ufomammut, Wounded Giant
~
