Bohren & Der Club Of Gore - Dolores 2xLP

Label: PIAS

Our Review:

Imagine a blackened, funereal doom band like Skepticism or Nortt morphed into the jazz idiom, playing their slow, sad music in a smoky Berlin jazz club. The sound is jazz (electric piano, organ, vibes, sax, double bass, trap kit), but the feeling is doom. That's the usual shorthand for describing the unique music made by Germany's Bohren & Der Club Of Gore. Here is their eagerly anticipated 5th album, Dolores. It's just as ponderously "heavy" as a "jazz" band can be. No, not loud, not harsh, not noisy. The opposite of all that. Rather, whisper-quiet, glacially slow, and spacious with sparse snare hits keeping time like a wound-down clock ticking off the eternity between 2 minutes to midnight and the witching hour itself. Doomsday so slowly arrives on a velvety bed of somnolent deep bass notes and the cool slinky tones of vintage Fender Rhodes. Cymbals shiver in a dark haze of ambient drones near to silence. Several of the songs are infused with the warmth of tenor or baritone sax breathes gorgeous expiring breaths. It's all so sad and woeful and achingly beautiful, Bohren nodding off, their fragile melodies trickling like tears, and by the end you may find you have shed a few too.