Bohren & Der Club of Gore, Monk Club, Rome

In the Portonaccio area, between the Prenestina station and via Tiburtina, the Monk Club is transformed for one night into a romantic Berlin local, of those wrapped in a threaded cigarette smoke. At the twilight of a Capitoline Tuesday, on the eyelash between the pungent winter and the first readers of April, the Bohren & der Club of Gore concert is like a collective rite, an intimate moment of melancholy sonic sharing. In the absence of a shoulder group, the audience fills the place slowly, while you drink a beer calmly, waiting for the launch, recently exceeded 9.15 pm.

The original group of Mülheim an der Ruhr, geographically and artistically close to the Kraftwerk Düsseldorf, rises like a shadow on the Monk stage for more than thirty-five years from the first more extreme experiments, from the first love to Grindcore and Doom-Metal. While more than one hair in leather jacket makes its way to the center of the restaurant, the live of the poignant German band could safely be listened to with a bottle of red wine illuminated by a soft lamp on the table of a Central European jazz-club. Christoph Clöser himself, hidden between cold lights and long silver hair, admits how interesting it is to play in front of a standing audience, with his slow and guttural English.
Thus it seems to attend a metal concert, between thunderous applause and the traditional “Daje”, when the same clöser whispers the beginning of “Patchouli Blue”, from the 2020 album that broke a silence that lasted six years. After the farewell of the drummer Thorsten Benning ten years ago, the B & Dcogs are today a trio that does not demonstrate the passage of time at all, dazzling in their glacial and dark trend. The dark-jazz (or jazz-noir) which becomes ambient; The ambient that becomes dark-jazz in a complete abandonment of any rhythmic ambition, to mark the musical time on a blue velvet of Lynchian memory.

In songs such as “Maximum Black”, the slow and obsessive rhythm of sax and Piano seems to come out of a novel of spirits, while the execution of “Karin” slips away sinuous in an ambient-jazz from film. Always in the balance between the sardonic and a genuine wonder, the dialogue between Christoph Clöser and the Roman public is like a whisper in the night, accompanying the black lyricism of songs such as “Midnight Black Earth”.
The concert of the German trio slips away longer than the average, at least to those of the scarce ninety minutes to which several bands of today, testing the audience's resistance to the most apocalyptic atmospheres. Sax illuminating glimpses in a version of “Still Am Tresen” which would not be bad in the most nocturnal Tom Waits catalog. The public assists as a kidnapped, greeting the group with a hot oction at the end of the set.
From Doom outbursts to the latest album, the German band is still formidable in diving in an imaginary world with high cinema coefficient. A gloomy, ruined, yet wonderful way.