Piano Nights, the eighth album by the German band Bohren & der
Club of Gore, is functionally the same as their seventh, sixth,
fifth, fourth, third, second, and first. The mood is solemn, the
tempos are slow, and each note carries within it the suggestion
that it might be the band’s last.  In some cases, repetition is
a sign of laziness or lack of imagination; in others—like
Bohren’s or the Ramones’—it’s a show of commitment to an idea so
elegant in its original design that changing it would constitute
betrayal. “We always offer our music in the same way and with
the same enthusiasm,” the band’s saxophonist and keyboard
player, Christoph Clöser, recently told an interviewer—which is
to say with no discernible enthusiasm at all. “If the audience
is strong enough to suffer uneventful music, we and the
listeners can celebrate as a kind of mass.”   One reason Bohren
persists in being so interesting despite their uneventfulness is
that their music contains a kind of secret history. Lounge jazz,
dark ambience, the