Bohren & der Club of Gore
Patchouli Blue

Bohren & der Club of Gore play a type of slow and unhurried doom jazz. The kind of stuff that makes images of a long-range film noir unfold in your mind and you are the only viewer sitting in the front row.

But there is something much deeper to find at the heart of their music, a chaotic nihilism that is martial and relentless. Extreme in its apparent simplicity. A dense atmosphere that refuses to let us relax and enjoy the allure of sensuality that might shine through as it intertwines with the sonic flow.

This is not cocktail music for a late-night dinner with a lover, even if the music might have a seductive power that could aid the meeting of two souls.

Patchouli Blue feels like the sequel to the band's 2014 Piano Nights. The album isn't languid and doesn't try to break hearts with its thick saxophone solos. It's an album that should give you the awareness that you are traveling alone into uncharted territories of your psyche where the vision of virtual demons is processed by you and lives with you. Der Club of Gore asks us to contemplate and interrogate the animal inside us, with its basic and primal urges.

All the band's albums have a surface that resembles each other, but there are subtle differences that emerge beneath the slow-motion patina of dark and super-low frequencies.

In Patchouli Blue, the band manages to update its distinctive sound with micro-movements without losing its timeless validity and universal applicability, which is so essential to the philosophical heart of the band. This is why Bohren remains so singularly important and hardly imitable.

The title track "Patchouli Blue," which lasts over nine minutes, is the highest point of the album and embodies the Bohren sound at its best. A heart-wrenching mix of reverberated keyboards, saxophone, and drones occupies the first three minutes until a guitar/bass duet makes its way to establish a rhythm.
"Zwei Herzen aus Gold" is an appropriate example of that unusual black melancholy. The electric keyboards seduce us into believing that the sense of mystery is concluded. But suddenly, the noose tightens, and darkness advances behind you, overpowering the melody.

The highlight of this fantastic record is the track, "Tief Gesunken." A vaguely Krautrock track that seems like the dark angel of the soul finally awakening from its deep slumber. It is menacing and ready for revenge on those who bring suffering.

It is artfully played music, direct and sincere, to explore foggy and transfigured areas of the mind, like watching a theatrical performance staged by spectral emanations dancing in a sonic abyss, in a cemetery where lush irises sprout from the cracks in the ground, which perhaps someone will gather........