An album with a name like Piano Nights immediately calls to mind a dour and downtrodden moment in a group's catalog. Bohren & Der Club Of Gore, however, thrive in the long and patient spaces between beats, where they eke out a brooding stagnant blend of drone and jazz, so melancholy is not exactly a new mood for them to explore. Strangely enough though, Piano Nights is probably more cathartic than their usual material. They make purgatory lounge music this time, as opposed to waltzing around in hell itself.
Often remarked on as the spiritual successor to the jazz scores of Angelo Badalamenti, there is no one currently so prolifically macabre as Bohren; so pregnant with emotion and ready to conjure up the appropriate images of checkered floors and red velvet curtains. Inspired by a Moscow performance where pianist Chrisoph Closer performed some of their older songs on piano, Piano Nights lends a lot of its weight to the titular instrument. Each song on this record draws out its lounge-y harmonies to the psychological extreme, withholding change right up to the point where a pressed hi-hat or a rattled cymbal signal some great sigh of relief. The piano arrangements are heard in a number of different iterations, some electric and some organic, but the strength and breadth of the sounds produced on this record are all held together by the inimitable plod of a baby grand, softly heartbreaking its way through each moribund composition.
"Fahr zur Hölle" plays with haunting organ and "Segeln ohne Wind" hits some oddly dissonant harmonics suggesting dark ambient music, but for the most part much of this album is indistinguishable between songs. "Verloren (Alles)" expands on a few ideas with the best successes, due to its length and arc. It is still fairly similar to the rest of the record, but when every moment is so calculated, playing anything more complicated than an eighth note seems revelatory and divisive. What is probably most jarring about this album is its relative pleasantness; Piano Nights seems to be one of Bohren's more uplifting suites when contrasted against past releases like Sunset Mission and Black Earth, pressing the limits of jazz versus ambient music in a way that makes the music sweeter and sadder but also lighter. It is an inessential release in that a lot of Bohren's music does not focus on progress or development, but it is as fine a record as they have ever put out.
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