Preorder Chronic Illness Wish and stream “Schooled in Every Grace” here.

Releases on February 23rd, 2024 via The Garrote.

For those who are not aware, I am a professional librarian. Understanding how to group and arrange things is something I’ve given much academic and professional thought. There’s a skill, some would say art, to conceptual analysis, an understanding of what components are and are not critical in the understanding of the primary idea of a work. In libraries, we call this “determining the aboutness” of a work. With non-fiction materials, this is a fairly straightforward process. With art, things can get tricky. For example, take Genital Shame’s excellent 2023 EP, Gathering My Wits, which made my list of top releases of 2023. Sure, you can describe it as black metal or raw black metal, but my librarian brain tells me this is an inadequate approximation of the “aboutness” of Gathering My Wits. This presents a classification challenge, which can result in the development of new controlled language to describe a work.

I am happy to report that Genital Shame, the Pittsburgh based solo project of Erin Dawson, did nothing to make determining “aboutness” easier with the forthcoming LP Chronic Illness Wish. Instead of reining it in, Genital Shame uses the extended run time to give us more ambient passages, more clean guitars against harsh vocals, more disorienting structures, more seasick acoustic guitars, and more black metal riffs. Chronic Illness Wish gives us more of, well, everything, once again presenting a challenge to established genre norms. Calling it raw black metal feels woefully reductive.

“Become Someone Specific” drops the listener straight into the deep end. The opening guitar line, a couplet of two note descending phrases, begs for a harmonic resolution as a cacophony of vocals, layered guitars, and feedback builds around it, only to be resolved as the guitar leads us into the LP’s first melodic riff. Genital Shame’s penchant for juxtapositions, particularly the use of relatively clean instrumentation and melodic lines in both the guitar and bass against harsh vocals, is on full display, setting the tone for what’s to come. The last minute of the track is a journey in and of itself, as the listener is guided through a lopsided groove, complete with added beats for fills and an unexpected acoustic guitar, before exploding into, perhaps, the most aggressive section of the song, and, ultimately, arriving at a splash of distortion to close. All of these ideas feel fully developed and realized. This is not simply a case of throwing spaghetti at a wall to see what sticks, and that is the beauty of Chronic Illness Wish.

Picking up where the noise from “Become Someone Specific” left off, “Schooled in Every Grace,” the single from the record, glides into a passage that, for my money, is one of the most inspired musical ideas on Chronic Illness Wish. The balance of the harsh, the tremolo picked guitar and vocals, against the peaceful, the clean guitar and the drum groove, creates a soundscape that feels like a pleasant daydream, smooth and glossy. With this, we’ve stumbled upon the real trick at work on Chronic Illness Wish. Somehow, Genital Shame makes heavy music that feels good. Even when “Schooled in Every Grace” explodes into frenetic blast sections, there’s a dreamy sense of peacefulness.

At the time of this review’s publication, “Schooled in Every Grace” is available ahead of the release of the full LP on February 23rd. Stream “Schooled in Every Grace” on Bandcamp.

The titular “Chronic Illness Wish” is a patient track. The first three minutes of its seven minute runtime are spent building in intensity, as the reverb drenched spoken word vocals become screams, as the bass’s attack takes on a grinding edge, and the drums propel the track forward before the track settles into a dreamlike, lopsided groove. Dawson pulls the listener forward through the middle of the song with rhythmic transitions, building in intensity once again to return to the chord progression established at the beginning of the song. These builds, and the releases that follow, are a core element of the record. Even the acoustic outro of “Chronic Illness Wish” is not content to remain static. It builds and adds layers before stripping them away.

Usually, I would take a fairly cynical view of a six minute ambient track. My mind immediately jumps to the idea of padding runtime and track counts. This is not the case with “Hermaphroditic Image.” The oppositional relationship central to so much of Chronic Illness Wish‘s experience is still in full swing, with soft synthesizers replacing the clean guitars and harsh noise replacing the vocals and more abrasive guitars. Textures, such as acoustic guitars and a bass, bubble to the surface only to quickly recede back into the wash.

On a record that is happy to bring you up and down the metaphorical hill time and time again, “Taste Rot,” with its relentless energy built around a sample that sustains itself rather than ebbing and flowing, is a welcome change of pace, especially as the penultimate track on Chronic Illness Wish. The track disintegrates in the middle, slowly breaking down until time and tonality are almost completely obscured. Out of this, the driving riff built around the sample emerges once again before giving way to an odd time synthesizer outro, ending similar to how it started and completing an almost symmetrical structure.

I always enjoy when the closing track feels like a thesis, a musical statement that touches on all elements of an album in a definitive way. “I Met Kerri Colby” certainly fits the bill. Featuring some of the album’s most seasick ambient passages, most aggressive guitar parts, and clever transitions, this final track puts more than a period at the end of the statement that is Chronic Illness Wish. As the noise builds around the acoustic guitar at the close of the record, I can’t help but return to the initial question…what is Chronic Illness Wish?

Black metal? Raw black metal? Progressive black metal? Is dream black metal a thing? Erin Dawson has playfully referred to Genital Shame as transwoman black metal. Maybe we’ll stick with that. Until someone comes up with new controlled language, to borrow a library term, I’m starting to think I’m better served by quieting the part of my librarian mind that seeks to classify everything. Instead, I will enjoy Chronic Illness Wish for what it is: an incredible record.

Stream “Schooled in Every Grace” and preorder the record on Bandcamp.