The months of November and December arrive, and with them, the most culturally desolate stretch of the year. Thankfully, Seattle's paramount metal, hardcore and punk venue, The Highline have kept their calendar vital through the holiday season. Even with the eminent consequence of their host building's purchase by a Northwest "lifestyle brand", the venue continues their strong programming into the new year. Late November and early December sees a night of experimental metal from New York's Liturgy and Kihalas, and another further along the doom and black metal end of the spectrum with Khemmis, Un and Witch Ripper. Liturgy occupying a far-flung branch of a growing international heavier school of blackness that Brad Sanders detailed in his piece for The Quietus. The article being an accessible opening unto the dark passageways of this genre's growing experimental variances. Their music deeply invested in aesthetics and a philosophical, sensorial agenda, through "Moral & Aesthetic Truths: An Interview With Liturgy". At Neumos the first week of December, Yob returns to town with heavy psychedelic rock accompaniment from Earthless and Portland's all female led doom outfit, Blackwater Holylight. Across town at the recently launched Substation, we get another night of blistering black metal and doom-inflected sounds with Exhumed, Gatecreeper and Necrot. Some of these same bands returning to Seattle after the assembly of progressive and black metal, doom, neofolk, noise and hardcore heard during the three iterations of Northwest Terror Fest. The global expansiveness of this sound and scene is probably best detailed in Brad Sanders' overview for The Quietus, "Untrue And International: Living in a Post-Black Metal World". These multitudinous offshoots from metal issuing from labels like Ipecac, Deathwish, Sargent House, Season of Mist, Roadburn, Neurot, 20 Buck Spin, Flenser, Relapse, and Profound Lore.
Representing for the more avant and industrial-spawned facet of this sound, power electronics composer and classically trained singer Kristin Hayter's devotional music inspired Lingua Ignota remains an outlier within this culture. Through, The Quietus' "Fire, Prayer & Curses: Lingua Ignota Interviewed", she plumbs its 12th Century sources of ecstatic inspiration where they meet in an urgent and ferocious record on the subject of the unsayable, the unspeakable, and the traumatic repression of abuse. Yet more than just a "Extreme Music Reckoning with Misogyny", for her third album "Caligula", Hayter adds that Lingua Ignota is not just about catharsis, but also transformation and retribution. Hayter shares a tour bill, including a night at Neumos with Daughters, who return to perform their jagged blistering take on metal, industrial, and postpunk informed hardcore as witnessed last year at The Highline. Seemingly revived from the abyss of a 8 year hiatus between albums, Daughters returned with a heavier and more genre-elusive collection of tracks that propelled them into the hybrid rock contenders of the year. The Rhode Island band are also known to deliver a furiously corybantic live show, scaling heights of dynamic power and propulsive hard hitting rhythms rarely seen even within post-hardcore culture. Their "You Won't Get What You Want" on their new home of Mike Patton's Ipecac label delivered a vituperative, abusive frisson of the heaviest nature. The album can be seen as an outward expression of what The Quietus' explored in their, "Overwhelmed By What’s Inside: Alexis Marshall Of Daughters Interviewed", in the unbound quality of its erruptive and abstracted menace.
