Nestled away in Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum is a stark, disturbing depiction of one of the Netherland’s darkest and strangest incidents. ‘The Corpses of the De Witt Brothers’ is a 17th century painting by Jan de Baen that shows two naked, disembowelled men hung by their feet from a gibbet. This was the fate of two of the country’s political heavyweights who were found guilty of treason and sentenced to exile; evidently, this punishment was insufficient for a mob of William of Orange’s followers who instead opted to murder, mutilate and, by some accounts, cannibalise the two men before calmly dispersing. It’s a haunting and unflinching work which has provided the always-prolific Jason Köhnen with inspiration for another exploration of the dark nether realm where dark jazz and metal meet.
Although Penance is very much Köhnen’s creation, with him not only taking on all of the composition but also the vast majority of the instrumentation and vocal work, the presence of veteran soprano Lilian Tong and prolific saxophonist Colin Webster (perhaps best known for his work with Dutch experimentalists Dead Neanderthals) are what truly elevate it as an expressive and multi-faceted work. Köhnen’s presence is frequently one of abject horror, his growls on opener ‘Si Quaeris’ almost bestial when positioned after Tong’s elegant, near-angelic aria, while ‘Symbolom Apostolorum’ leans fully into his metal background, a flurry of blastbeats and guttural rasps reminiscent of Gnaw Their Tongues at their most apocalyptic.
Its album centrepiece ‘Anima Christi’ that most fully embodies Penance’s raison d’etre, presenting the medieval hymnal as a dualistic darkjazz epic that reflects the veneration of pain and violence within the church and in art itself. Starting out as a stirring slice of chamber melodrama, Köhnen’s drumming soft and skittish, as he picks up the pace and breathy roars begin to fill up the empty space it takes on the restless energy of intrusive thoughts that worm their way into the brain right as you hover on the border of sleep. Webster’s sax follows suit, increasingly impassioned, until Tong and Köhnen offer up their own takes on the prayer. Tong’s is haunting and classically beautiful, a gorgeous offering of piety, but Köhnen’s rendition has a cruel irony to it, his rasps of “Passio Christi, conforta me” uttered with the weariness of the damned.
‘Requiem Aeternam’ is briefer in comparison but no less impactful as Tong offers up her angelic pleas over a bed of crackling static and muted synths, but it’s the passion in Webster’s delivery that is truly moving, measured and mournful at first but gradually building to fever dream intensity. The brief ‘Confiteor’ passes the baton back to Köhnen, his voice coming across like a gaggle of drowning demons while creaking dark ambient passages and the occasional stab of piano twist and melt together into the album’s most overtly horrifying composition, and then it’s up to ‘Te Deum’ to bring the album to a close. Though not quite as sprawling as ‘Anima Christi’ it remains an immersive and impressively constructed slab of jazz noir, bringing together pain and rapture, languid bass thrums and searing saxophone solos, and a final stirring performance from Tong into one of the band’s most ambitious compositions to date.
Penance is an album that deserves not just to be listened to but also to be studied and analysed. Like de Baen’s painting, it shows the beauty of horror, the ugliness of humanity’s worst indulgences, and by juxtaposing Tong’s angelic tone and the impassioned, roiling chaos of Webster it sits itself right alongside humanity in the hinterland between heaven and hell. Even the use of Latin hymnals feels like a commentary on the nature of the De Witt brother’s final moments which served as the flashpoint for the rise of Calvinism within the Netherlands, and in this curious meeting of art, religion and violence, Köhnen has created something that deserves the utmost respect.
