Long out of print, Gore Metal is the very first Bohren album, released on German label Epistrophy back in 1994. Even back then, this was one tough fucking CD to find, so I'm quite stoked to finally have this in my mitts. It is, of course, a substantially different animal than the force of jazz-informed glacial majesty that Bohren & Der Club Of Gore would ultimately transform into, but this more primal, more pugilistic announcement of their presence holds some supreme slo-mo heaviness bliss. Indeed, Gore Motel has always been one of my very favorite albums from the band, their self-described "unholy ambient mixture of slow jazz ballads, Black Sabbath doom and down-tuned Autopsy sounds" being absolutely irresistible to me. Many of their signature elements are here: the intense vibrations of the bass guitar snaking through fields of austere blackness, softly brushed percussion skittering way back in the shadows, this dire dirge-rock washed with smears of glorious reverb-soaked guitar that puts forth a strange Western twang amid the spare, hulking movement of the band. That Morricone-esque guitar and its attendant whammy bends and droning notes and sun-blasted melodies sounds reminiscent of some of the stuff that Earth was doing in the early 90s - I swear that I would assume that those Sub Pop albums like Phase 3: Thrones And Dominions and Pentastar: In The Style Of Demons just had to have had some kind of direct influence on these guys, but by all appearances Gore Metal preceded those albums by at least a year. It's one of those weird synchronous events, I guess. People needed to make this particular sound.

And it's great stuff, like I said. Long, too. The twelve-song album stretches all the way out to seventy-four minutes, so there's plenty of room to sprawl out and just get lost in this strange space of permanent twilight, epic twang, and a bass guitar heavy enough to knock you over. I glean nothing from the song titles: "Dangerflirt Mit Der Schlägerbitch", "Der Maggot Tango" and "Conway Twitty Zieh Mit Mir" are absurdism, revealing nothing on my end about what's going on in these guy's heads. So what, I guess. All flows together anyways, one big body of sound, shimmering Mellotron on the ceiling, tremolo-rich guitars reverberating in the wake of that lumbering, doom-laden bass guitar, the drummer providing these accents and jazz-style flourishes rather than any kind of momentum. Some odd noises occur on the outer fringes, some clattery Casio drum rhythm, oscillators, bits of random noise and the sound of people in a room. There's only that twinge of noir ambience drifting around these gorgeous minimalist dirges, not yet developed into a major component. It's all desert-scorched atmosphere, more Badalamenti than anything, but with that subdued menace lurking in the spaces behind each cymbal hiss and Sabbathoid bass line. You'll hear organ-like tunes that apparently floated out of some early 60s gothic horror film. Rampant improvisation as everybody gets up and marches together into what oblivion is waiting outside of their door. There's little more than a desolation of distant metallic rumbles, distant ghosts of nightmare melodic strains, and creepy industrial death-drift that makes up "Cairo Keller", and it's awesome. Bubbling muck. "Maggot tango" sounds like one of the monstrous psychedelic tribal numbers from a Filipino "Blood Island" splatfest. Shit definitely starts to tip over into weirder and weirder territory as you approach the finale, with some insanely stretched out riff-drone workouts and nod-inducing psychedelia thrown into the mix. So no, there is no jazz here. Though the very basic template of their aesthetic is laid out on Gore Motel, this is the most raw and downright heavy I've ever heard Bohren Und Der Club Of Gore. One of the best dark hypno-rock / experimental spook-shows of that decade.

The CD reissue comes in a full-color eight-panel digipak that is laid out with mysterious and random imagery that perfectly fits the weird zone these guys were living in. Something else for sure, a torturously slow degeneration that you don't even realize until it's all over. . A classic in the field of underground barbiturate music.