Bohren & Der Club of Gore - Doom and Gloom Music To Dispel Doom and Gloom

How to switch from heavy metal to jazz and stay true to your concept

Looking at the covers of quite a few releases of German left-fielders Bohren & Der Club of Gore, you could get the impression that you are deeply in the field of heavy spells of doom metal. And you wouldn’t be too far away from the truth. After all Bohren did start out as a ‘straightforward’ doom metal band. 

Yet, at some point Bohren obviously decided that metal and hardcore punk where the band originated in the late eighties was not the direction they wanted to pursue. Well, at least musically. 

Sometime in the mid-nineties, they decided they wanted to turn their doom and gloom visions into something more ethereal, elongated, and minimalistic - a combination of Ben Webster, a jazz sax player that rarely played a fast note, and mood music Angelo Badalamenti created for David Lynch’s phantasmagorias, essentially film noir music for new generations.

It started out with two-hour long ‘Midnight Radio’ in 1995, but really took its true shape and form with ‘Sunset Mission’ that appeared, as if almost out of nowhere at the turn of the century. There, as in some of the best film noir settings, the music would appear out of nowhere and disappear in exactly the same manner - with both the melody and rhythm displaying all shades of gray - both deeply sinister and sweet and sensuous at the same time.

As the releases rolled out, sometimes at a faster pace like in the mid-00s, sometimes at the pace of the music itself (later on), the sound layers and pace remained as slow as molasses, but the accent was switching from saxophone to piano to vibraphone and back.

At one point, vocals by Mike Patton cropped in (‘Catch My Heart’ from ‘Beileid,’ 2011), but one line never got lost - the line between sinister and sweet doom and light is never clear, they overlap and never go on without the other. Bohren & De Club of Gore seem to express that in their music in the best possible manner.