Genital Shame - Lion Piss + Arm Vulnerability EP - CD

Erin Dawson’s experimental black metal project, Genital Shame, explores various tensions at various edges. For Dawson, who lightheartedly calls herself “a simple trans woman from the hills of West Virginia,” these tensions are lived.

There is tension between the project’s very origins and the way in which Dawson now understands the complex and evocative music on her debut EP, Lion Piss + Arm Vulnerability. While out for a run one morning in Pittsburgh, her adopted home, the thought came to her, clear and complete and simple: “You must start a one-woman metal band called Genital Shame.” But to work in a genre which rewards adherence to strict codes, and to interrogate and antagonize those codes, is less simple.

Befriending Nechochwen’s Aaron Carey nearly 20 years ago in West Virginia and in turn coming to understand the heavily codified world of black metal was a profound experience for Dawson. “I really like rules,” she says. Running parallel to a love of Scriabin and Russian modern composers, the depths of her fascination were inevitable.

Genital Shame is a queering of the sonic traditions and musical form of black metal –– perhaps an antagonism of the genre’s rules. It is, in Dawson’s words, “an interrogation of how far you can get towards breaking those rules without it being something else.” Those very delicate, precise rules and also the overarching themes and modes of black metal motivate Dawson. And, as one might expect, the result is something which is both black metal and perhaps not at all. In just shy of 15-minutes, Lion Piss + Arm Vulnerability veers from heavily distorted tremolo picked guitar and distant propulsive drums to gentle, bedroom pop ambience, before careening back again.

On the other hand, fiercely railing against evangelical Christianity, as Genital Shame assuredly does, is common to –– even arguably necessary for the authenticity of –– black metal. And as a trans person from rural West Virginia, both this hostile critique of rightwing morality and a desire to dive deep into the complex alternate worlds of music is profoundly personal. And so it is far from pure antagonism of genre that animates this project. None of the tensions Genital Shame represents are absolute, nor are they necessarily revolutionary in and of themselves. Erin Dawson is participating in an emergent tradition of trans, queer, and nonbinary metal musicians, acknowledging Margaret Killjoy and Liturgy’s Hunter Hunt-Hendrix as predecessors.

One need not understand any of the codes over and against which Dawson is working to be thrilled by the simultaneously epic and intimate noise that is Lion Piss + Arm Vulnerability. And one need not understand the concept of through-composition to become lost in the flowing and elegant stream of Dawson’s music, which shares something in common with the forward-tumbling structures employed by Yellow Eyes and Mizmor. Fans of Efrim Manuel Menuck’s Pissing Stars may also find something to love here, some sense of a kindred spirit in the effective tension between a kind of sonic intensity and a fragile intimacy. Genital Shame is an exploration of identity without hierarchy and a kind of joyful introspection performed at a bewildering volume.