Piano Nights, the eighth album by the German band Bohren & der Club of Gore, is functionally the same as their seventh, sixth, fifth, fourth, third, second, and first. The mood is solemn, the tempos are slow, and each note carries within it the suggestion that it might be the band’s last.
In some cases, repetition is a sign of laziness or lack of imagination; in others—like Bohren’s or the Ramones’—it’s a show of commitment to an idea so elegant in its original design that changing it would constitute betrayal. “We always offer our music in the same way and with the same enthusiasm,” the band’s saxophonist and keyboard player, Christoph Clöser, recently told an interviewer—which is to say with no discernible enthusiasm at all. “If the audience is strong enough to suffer uneventful music, we and the listeners can celebrate as a kind of mass.”
One reason Bohren persists in being so interesting despite their uneventfulness is that their music contains a kind of secret history. Lounge jazz, dark ambience, the languorous adagios of classical-music requiem, and the saturated romance of Italian film soundtracks: All of it is folded into Piano Nights. Heard at a distance, the album can sound uniform and insubstantial; up close, it not only covers a lot of ground, but ground you might not expect to overlap.
For as gentle as their sound is, the band has always played with intensity and conviction. At their slowest tempos a Bohren song feels like a series of notes both disconnected from the ones before it and yet articulated with total clarity, like bright stars forming a constellation in an otherwise dark sky. When I saw the band live in 2008, the tension in the room wasn’t a function of volume or speed, but the contrast between the certainty of the notes they played and the silences that followed. Watching them—four hunched German men in charcoal and black—was like watching horror-movie zombies lumber toward their next kill: Each blow was just a matter of time.
If there’s been an evolution in the band’s approach, it’s mostly sonic. Their earliest recordings were chilly and even brittle; Piano Nights is luxurious in its warmth. Nearly every track is backlit by vaporous ambience; the cymbals seem to ring in slow motion.
The sharpest voice in the mix is usually the saxophone, which Clöser plays with the persistent, exhausted tone of someone trying to explain something they’ve tried to explain a thousand times before—too tired to fight but not tired enough to give up.
Yes, this music gets dull—it’s supposed to. I can’t imagine listening to it all the time for the same reasons I can’t imagine trying to cook an entire meal using only a garlic press. But in their limited pursuits Bohren captures a mood other music either struggles to or just doesn’t bother with: Not sadness (too acute), not angst, but a sumptuous, all-purpose melancholy, the kind of thing you might experience watching a frozen field from the window of a slow-moving train.
Clöser had used the word “mass.” The highlights on Piano Nights—“Fahr zur Hölle,” “Verloren (Alles),” “Segeln ohne Wind”—feel like church music. The sly, suggestive blue notes of jazz give way to processions of organ and horn. What was once threatening and concealed feels stewarded toward the light. “Triumph” is too corny a word for a band like Bohren & der Club of Gore. But for the first time, it might fit.
