Goya
Harvester Of Bongloads

Outside the leaves are falling and the sky is gray, inside it's time to start using the bedspread and smoking with the window open will soon be a challenge...
It's coming, in spite of Martin and his winter, the doom season is arriving.

Jeff Owens entered my living room three or four years ago with acoustic renditions of some Electric Wizard songs. Just voice and guitar, that's all. I opened his first video with the impulse to pulverize his work with a barrage of epithets since on paper it's already quite clear that a genre like stoner doom only makes sense electrically; the volume in Wizard's music is as important as water in a bong, and if you want to redo a stoner doom band like the Wizard acoustically, if you're lucky you're the school fool, if you're unlucky someone listens to your tracks and you get what you deserve.

I often make mistakes willingly, but starting with the idea of laughing in someone's face and ending up offering them three kilos of crushed herb on the bare bodies of five virgins was quite a shock to my already shaky self-esteem in the field of music criticism. The Acoustic Wizard is a pirate project anyone interested in music should pass through. Even without knowing the originals, two or three tracks from Jeff's project, if you're here, you have an ethical duty to listen to them. Indeed, continue to read about the goya while listening to the Acoustic Wizard.

The project lasted for three EPs; Jeff was contacted directly by Electric Wizard, who complimented him on what he had achieved but also pointed out that their agent was not equally enthusiastic and threatened legal action. Many major pieces of Electric Wizard did not become Acoustic, and every time I think of a piece like "Doom Mantia", my grinder weeps for what else it could have become.

Time passes, and amid listens, I end up reading the name of the pirate who took on the acts of the apostles of stoner doom (the bible sleeps, you all know it, those who don't understand should go elsewhere and listen to the acoustic wizard; from now on the page is only for initiates). Jeff Owens indeed, and the transition on Discogs becomes a subconscious imposition.
Joy, jubilation, amazement, the guy is not that young, and at the moment he finds himself with five albums under his belt. Under the name Goya. Electric. Doom. That... well done. Right? I will avoid the review at this point, I know it and you know it: it would be useless, we already know everything.

Now, looking at the covers, I discover I've already come across Goya on Bandcamp several times and always glossed over them: good, excellent, but I have more records like that than I want to make a bong at nine in the evening when I get home, and the space on the hard drive is what it is. Just out of curiosity, I dive into listening to the latest work, while I'm at work, where for two months I haven't worked, staring at walls and cameras in anticipation of the real cold to come and the seasons of the Shitty Shows to begin (no, I won't tell you where I work, instead I invite those who haven't yet to open the blue links I dropped earlier, you need to have heard the Acoustic Wizard, you need it).

Doom is beautiful for many reasons, one of which is that if you listen to it at the right volumes, time flies. That blessed "bong loader reaper," waiting for this evening to reap me as well, has been spinning since ten in the morning, keeping boredom and tedium vitae at bay, and while I fiddle with tablets and emulators on an improbable twenty-year-old Japanese platform, it's a company I can just about regret on December twenty-fifth, where I didn't have doom at work, but I had herb (it was quite a peculiar Christmas, on the one hand, I hope not to repeat it, on the other, I can't wait).

Those who live or have lived with the genre will find the album a good excuse to listen to stuff they know better; those who ignore the genre would start with a non-fundamental work with this record.
So why am I here?
Partly because the boss at the seventh level was making me swear in Sumerian, partly because Jeff has a nice voice, he's not a real singer, but in my opinion, he has a great timbre - and I prefer instrumental pieces, so I don't know if it counts as a merit of my writing to introduce you to a singer - but above all because you must have heard the Acoustic Wizard at least once in your life, and finally, as superfluous as it may be to emphasize, because a title like that in the site's database could not be missing (though I'm not entirely sure if the bongs loaded are being reaped, or those like me who load the bongs despite not being lithium batteries)

In case I explained myself poorly: the Goya don't matter to me, they might matter more to you, but first, go listen to Jeff solo, where he unpacks his acoustic strings and yells into the microphone, there's really a lot there. This is a canonical appetizer for the more doubtful, the main course is the other one.