Every so often an album comes along that is so wondefully avante-garde, so completely off-the-wall, and so fascinating that it leaves you feeling a bit like you’re stood in a busy shopping centre, looking for the information desk with no clothes on. Penance, the fifth album from Jason Köhnen’s The Lovecraft Sextet is exactly that record!
Picture, if you will, the very specific space that can only be found between a smoky jazz club, a Baroque cathedral and the soundtrack to an especially unpleasant fever dream and you’ll be some of the way there. Inspired by Jan de Baen’s disturbing painting depicting the mutilated bodies of the Dutch De Witt brothers, the record explores humanity’s capacity for brutality through a collision of dark jazz, chamber music, electronic ambience and black metal. It’s a pretty grim subject, naturally, but Köhnen’s fascination lies in the uncomfortable relationship between beauty and horror, in that small pocket of voyeurism and macabre that humanity has always been drawn to.
Si Quaeris introduces the album with subdued percussion, murky synths and Colin Webster’s mournful, smoky saxophone…you’d be forgiven for thinking you were about to be treated to a stylised, noir-inspired monologue talking about a murder on the streets of 1920’s New York. Instead, you are subjected to Köhnen’s guttural growls that sit in direct juxtaposition to Lilian Tong’s almost angelic soprano lines. The contrast is immediately striking; moments of exquisite elegance continually threatened by something far more malevolent. The late, great, David Lynch would have had an absolute blast listening to this!!
Symbolom Apostolorum abandons much of that restraint, erupting into ragged blast beats and vicious, distorted vocals. The transition is deliberately jarring, but this is by no means a tradtional black metal track, there are still the shrill wails of saxophone, eerie piano passages and a whole plethora of other musical ideas thrown into the (rather disturbing) boiling pot!
The twelve-minute Anima Christi is the album’s centrepiece, and arguably its finest achievement. Skittering percussion, impassioned saxophone and disquieting vocal exchanges gradually form an immersive, unpredictable piece. Tong’s soprano brings a genuinely haunting sense of devotion, while Köhnen’s monstrous counterpoint turns that apparent spirituality into something deeply unsettling. The tension between the two is far more effective than any straightforward blast of aggression could be.
Requiem Aeternam allows Webster’s saxophone to take centre stage, its mournful delivery growing gradually more impassioned over crackling electronics and understated instrumentation. Meanwhile, Confiteor is considerably uglier, with distorted spoken vocals and dissonant textures conjuring the image of a demonic sermon delivered from a collapsing, slime-covered pulpit.
Köhnen’s compositions are consistently imaginative, but Penance could occasionally be accused of prioritisng atmosphere to the detriment of progression. Some transitions feel abrupt, and certain passages linger in the same atmosphere long enough to lose their initial impact. Nevertheless, the performances of Tong and Webster give the album a remarkable expressive range, preventing its bleakness from becoming one-dimensional. Penance is an ambitious, deeply unsettling record that finds its most compelling moments where grace and grotesquery meet. It may not always know exactly where it’s going, but it’s an absolute joy to get lost within it’s world of dark streets, extravagant churches and pools of primordial ooze.
Best Paired with – A lazily smoking cigar in an art-deco ashtray, a rather fine hat made of gold, and an unsettling feeling that somebody is following you down the street.
Reviewed by Bryn.
The Lovecraft Sextet – Penance is out now on Debemur Morti Productions.
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