Four drunk Germans formed Bohren & der Club of Gore one night in 1992 with a single goal: "The audience," Morten Gass told the metal zine Maelstrom in 2003, "must have the feeling of being in a grave." Naming the band inspired debate. "Bohren" means "drill," like what people do to other people in horror movies; "gore" means "gore," like what seeps out of people when they're drilled, and like a Dutch instrumental band they all quite liked; and "and der club of" made them think of jazz. Jazz, they agreed, was cool. It was urban and dangerous-- they liked the idea of it. Stated influences were Black Sabbath and Sade. "As I said," Gass confessed, "we were drunk." Cheers to auspicious beginnings.
The music Bohren makes is slow, quiet, and pretty. It's too structured to be jazz and too vivid to be ambient, but it taps into the ideals of both. They play their instruments like they're worried of waking babies asleep at their feet. Christoph Clöser's saxophone parts leak from the bell of his horn. You can almost see Morten Gass wince as his fingers sink into his keyboard. Drummer Thorsten Benning lives with the task of supressing every teenage dream of beating the shit out his drumkit like the wild animal I suspect he sometimes wants to be. But in near-stasis, there's drama-- each beat becomes a cliffhanger for the next. Bohren don't play dead, they play mortally wounded.
They're the gentlest black metal band on earth. They're anti-social cocktail music. They're exotica, but only if we agree that vacant alleys are exotic places and lying face down in one of them would constitute a vacation. The restraint in their music creates as much tension as it does calm. At best-- 2004's Black Earth-- Bohren sound like they're passing through darkness, palms out and eyes open, in search of a lightswitch. It's the same eerie, bloodless quality of ersatz jazz that David Lynch depended on for club scenes in Mullholland Drive or Audrey Horne's twirling in "Twin Peaks", where the mellow becomes queasy and relaxation sours into uncertainty – when what's supposed to relax you starts to actively upset you.
Creeps? First-rate. But they're strangely affectionate, too, a quality brought to the fore on Dolores, their sixth and latest full-length. Absorb the title and cover art-- a woman's name, glowing; moths pouring from the neck of some sexless, celestial being. It's cozy, leaden music. Songs have shortened to three or four minutes. Some of the melodies aren't just memorable, but actually hummable. Call this their "standards" album-- More Near-Static Ballads of Death's Sweet Embrace. Bohren aren't fabulous enough to be goths. They keep it austere. The grave might be a lonely place, but the dead always downplay its warmth.
