Review: Uboa – Impossible Light
I often see Uboa described as cinematic, maybe due to how large-scale and ambitious the music of their breakout project The Origin Of My Depression was. But to me, the sound that Xandra Metcalfe achieves—even going back to earlier records like Coma Wall—is a sound that manages to unify inhuman sounds with scorchingly frank humanity, music that is often uncompromisingly dark but never feels detached from human experiences.
Impossible Light, the new Uboa record, is Xandra’s first full-length since her 2019 sleeper-breakthrough The Origin Of My Depression, though Uboa has kept active as a project, releasing collaborative records with Teeth Dreams and Bolt Gun, as well as the excellent EP The Flesh Of The World.
“Phthalates” leers into earshot with a sound that is simultaneously pretty but is soured with this disquieting build-up, a palpable tension amplified by the irregular, scattershot percussion and radio-static vocal samples. It’s a track that manages to escalate in scope but manages to keep a certain amount of restraint; even at its most intense, it feels controlled, almost more structured, setting the tone for the rest of Impossible Light.
“Endocrine Disruptor”‘s dirge-synth pans in the distance, a backdrop to the sounds of crushed metal, distorted clanking and undefined pops and tears, all accenting this infectious pizzicato arpeggio playing over the haunting vocals. It’s a relatively simple track by Uboa standards, but the way it explodes with these colossal beats in the last third of the song is genuinely transcendent shit. So much is made of the pitch-blackness of Uboa’s discography that the project’s moments of raw, ephemeral beauty found on a track like “Endrocine Disruptor” is often overlooked. Lyrically it feels more forceful, more direct: the ideation and pure negation found on The Origin Of My Depression isn’t exactly replaced here, but instead feels more focused.
“Aesthetic endocrinology / We’ll make a woman out of ecology / If we are unnatural like they say / Then we will take their precious nature away”.
The rapid normalization and spread of anti-trans rhetoric, alongside the rapid institutionalized scapegoating and abuse of trans people since the release of The Origin Of My Depression alone seem to have informed in the album a lot of urgency, frankness and directness. In many ways it results in a more stark, frightening listen—an album informed by trans experiences, neurodivergent experiences, and how the othering results in art that feels the need to be more active, direct.
“The Puzzle” has the sort of oppressive, slow-lurch synth-work you’d hear on one of the better Lustmord records, punctuated by these colossal, percussive gunshots. It incorporates and corrupts “traditional” noise elements throughout, where these blasts of static are subsumed by Uboa’s unique form of electronic harshness. It’s a track that sounds like it’s constantly collapsing under its own weight, paced in a way that manages to creep up on you despite its immense volume and heaviness.
“Gordian Worm” seems at first to follow in this sound (with collaboration from fellow Melbourne noise-maker Blood Of A Pomegranate, whose underrated 2022 record 7000 Haunting Artsakh you should definitely check out) but undergoes a complete chrysalis transformation by the end. The burning, repellent noise of its beginning ultimately transforms into something more electro-industrial in sound, not entirely dissimilar to the The Body / Uniform collaborations from a few years ago. It’s of course far removed from a traditional EBM sound but its use of tightly syncopated beats and unique, distorted drops make it something wholly individual in the tracklist.
Their collaboration continues on “Pattern Screamers” which contains perhaps the most intense vocal performance on the record, accentuated by the crackling distortion emulating corrupted machinery around it. “Pattern Screamers” is an interesting track because it feels quite literally like a song of two halves: one that begins with an almost liturgical bent and one that feels like a deliberate inversion, hellish while still retaining the crystalline synth in the background. As a result, it sounds more blasphemous than most earnestly blasphemous black metal.
“Jawline” and “Weaponised Dysphoria” feel like sister tracks, transitioning elegantly into one another. “Jawline” has this sweeping choral element (featuring Extra Life vocalist Charlie Looker) that piggybacks off of a panning, malevolent synth line. It’s a restrained track that’s injected with a tease of harsh electronics at its very final moment, before the eruption that is “Weaponised Dysphoria.” The latter is a track with the inverse progression of “Jawline,” beginning harsh before returning to a now-welcoming choral segment, initially accompanied by glitch electronics.
“Sleep Hygiene” feels appropriate on the first full-length record of Uboa’s since coming out of lockdown: a song whose lyrics depict this bed-ridden depressive feeling, exacerbated by feelings of unproductivity. The music switches between these extremes of intense emotions depicted by bombastic, intense noise and sobering, reflective breaks of acoustic guitar and ambient synth pads. A song that speaks to the simultaneous demonization of illness, pain, surgery and recovery.
Closing track “Impossible Light / Golden Flower” introduces itself with what sounds like a toy piano and Xandra’s vocals, evoking something that’s both lonely but also retains this pained bliss to it. It transitions into a passage that blurs the sound of electronics and rainfall together as collaborator otay:onii recites Eight Immortals’ poet Lü Dongbin’; part of the song’s title taking its name from a translation by Jung, The Secret Of The Golden Flower. As an individual track it’s probably the best thing put out under the Uboa moniker—achingly beautiful yet harrowing, in a way not a lot of music is.
At face value, it seems hard to call a record like Impossible Light hopeful, and typing it out now, maybe that’s the wrong word. It’s not even hope for something visible, a hope for the titular light at the end of the tunnel, but just a hope for its own sake. Hope in existing while in a world that resents your existence. Hope that the light that’s currently impossible is one day tangible, real, within reach.
Impossible Light is out now on The Flenser.
