### The Loathsome Couple: The loathsome couple

#### 22/02/12 || gk

The Loathsome Couple is a three piece from Seattle who take their name from an Edward Gorey novel about a child murdering couple and feature Tobias Burch of the one man funeral doom project Amort. Here, the man sticks to contributing vocals and the music is a harsh and bleak exercise in blackened sludge with doom and hardcore influences.

“Kublai Kahn (The Patriarch of Amstetten)” opens the album with its mournful and contemplative guitars and slow build of atmosphere with some spoken word vocals. It doesn’t take long to change gears though and pretty soon the song shifts into a harsh, sludge epic with dissonant riffs and distorted vocals. A clean guitar line cuts through the sludge for a well placed solo as the song continues to build momentum and heads for a superbly designed climax. Pretty great album opener and really made me sit up and take notice. “Aleph (The Blind Architect of Destruction)” begins with a kickass death metal riff and some growls that are buried in the mix before mutating into a furious hardcore beatdown with shouty vocals. The tribal drumming and dissonant riffs remind me a bit of early Neurosis but there’s an urgency and ugliness to the music that makes it original and quite captivating, especially when the band changes tempo seamlessly. “Love Letter Pt. 1 (The Travails of a Dutch National)” starts soft and slow but then explodes into an epic doom metal riff around the 2 minute mark. “Love Letter Pt. II (A Drowning)” is almost ambient for the most part with the guitars and drums building a dark and unsettling atmosphere before the big blow out ending happens around the 5 minute mark and the song goes off into a kickass groove. This probably kills live. The album ends with “Born Into This (An Evisceration at Holy Mountain)” which is the most straight forward doom metal of the songs here and has another incredibly good build up towards to the end.

Tobias Burch has found a solid couple of musicians in guitarist Matt Vogan and drummer Mike Vogan. Matt’s guitar playing is impressive as he mixes and matches styles and combines doom, hardcore and black metal with a dark and sludgy tone. He seems to have at least a couple of kickass riffs in every song and he’s more than ably backed up by Mike who’s drumming seems to take inspiration from the tribal pummeling of Jason Roeder of Neurosis. His style adds a very impressive texture and manages to lift the riffs up. These songs don’t really miss the bass player at all. Burch’s vocals are mostly distorted and usually a bit buried in the mix but he uses a variety of styles and his voice often comes across more as a third instrument in the band.

This is a pretty impressive debut from The Loathsome Couple and the songs are bleak and harsh but also have enough going on to always stay interesting. The Loathsome Couple manage to mix early Neurosis with the atmosphere of “The Mantle” era Agalloch and yeah, I know hat sounds strange. The whole album can be downloaded for free from their Bandcamp page so get on board. This is some pretty original and powerful music. Anyone into the harsher side of doom and sludge would do well to check this out.

- Information
- Released: 2011
- Label: Self released
- Website: http://theloathsomecouple.bandcamp.com
- Band
- Tobias Burch: vocals
- Matt Vogan: guitars
- Mike Vogan: drums

- Tracklist
- 01. Kublai Kahn (The Patriarch of Amstetten)
- 02. Aleph (The Blind Architect of Destruction)
- 03. Love Letter Pt. 1 (The Travails of a Dutch National)
- 04. Love Letter Pt. II (A Drowning)
- 05. Intermission
- 06. Born Into This (An Evisceration at Holy Mountain)