Bohren & der Club of Gore Beileid

Some call it “dark jazz”, others “ambient jazz”, and still others “doom jazz”. Whatever it is, and whatever it should be called, Bohren & der Club of Gore have been cultivating it since 1992. It would be a shame to describe it as “introspective” or “despairing,” because this is one band that is clearly more than those.

Bohren & der Club of Gore won’t be accused of being imitators of Davis or Coltrane (nor slower versions), but that same unkempt eroticism is the driving force here. Even those same instruments that have defined jazz music over nearly a century are here — the saxophone, the piano, a booming bass, the Rhodes, and so much more — and they’re not being used in ways that particularly innovate the use of musical instruments.

The sound, alien and foreign as it is, is close enough to home to invite strangers to its cold, thoughtful doors. Make no mistake, this isn’t jazz as you’ve experienced it before — but it’s jazz, and it’s free, spirited, emotional. It’s all the things jazz should be, but it’s unapologetic and it’s dark, it’s booming, it’s ominous — it’s even frightening.

The genre-defining Rhodes is once again at the fore here in this latest output, Beileid. This, their seventh album, doesn’t see the band having abandoned their sound, though there are some vocals, on which I’m not particularly sold. Sure, they’re Mike Patton’s, and they strangely appear in a cover of Warlock’s Catch My Heart — a track Bohren & der Club of Gore have surely made their own — but they are almost jarring.

But maybe that element of discomfort, of artist-defining disquiet, is necessary to avoid stagnation. And it’s hard to fault the band when, even if Patton’s vocals are unnecessary theatrical and disruptive, they manage to turn the track from a cover of an obscure 1994 metal ballad into something altogether more brooding.

The rest of the release — two tracks, Zombies Never Die (Blues) and the titular Beileid — is as engaging and evocative as the band has been, and it’s to their credit that this three-track release they term uneventful (perhaps properly, though it’s hardly a slight against them) is so striking. It may indeed be uneventful within the confines of the album, but the overarching event is too fascinating to ignore.