Impossible Light - Uboa: Review
Review by Lavender:
Uboa is the noise project of Australian artist Xandra Metcalfe whose music has often attacked gender dysphoria and the machinations of being trans both in society and in your own mind through blistering noise music. That formula reached its apex on the 2019 album The Origin Of My Depression one of the rawest and most uncompromising portrayals of gender dysphoria, depression, and self-doubt I've ever heard. I poured out love for the album when it dropped and did the same thing the following year with the EP that followed it up. I've been highly anticipating whatever Uboa did next ever since, which is why the surprise dropping of Impossible Light was such an overwhelming delight.
In the promotional material for this record, Uboa painted its whims in surprisingly optimistic language. But even though the album is ultimately about seeing a path forward, that doesn't mean the journey it takes to get there is easy. Opener Phthalates is a brooding start to the album. It's an impressively patient build from literal silence into a messy, glitchy, distorted landscape that feels undefinably far away. As the song goes on it does start to creep closer and closer towards you in a decidedly ominous way. Every time you blink a new shrill synth stretched beyond recognition or an unidentifiable metallic whiff pierces your ears just a bit louder than anything you've heard before.
That's one of the only times the record even flirts with being "quiet." Another is Jawline a pseudo-ambient cut whose title takes on one of the most common sources of dysphoria among trans women. That carries into Sleep Hygiene which begins as a fittingly reserved meditation on Xandra's own inability to even get out of bed. But eventually, that listlessness turns into a much more direct eruption of anger.
One of the things that makes this album so compelling to me is Xandra's remarkable storytelling. Endocrine Disruptor is sort of like dipping your toes into the noisier side of the record. It does feature fuzzing distortion and booming drums firing off in every direction but it's surprisingly spacious and with lyrics that are easier to understand. That's a good thing because the lyrical content is absolutely fascinating. The song calls for a king of mass de-gendering and sterilizing of all creatures in nature. It leads from Xandra's own positive experiences with hormone therapy directly through her own body and out into nature in visceral detail.
The other example of visceral storytelling comes on Gordian Worm. The song lives up to its name as a disgustingly detailed story about a worm, as in a literal parasite living inside of Xandra, and the ways she comes to feel both protected and erotically nurtured by it. That's met with a fittingly grinding palette of distorted instrumentation that provides noise without every completely enveloping the song's narrative content.
But speaking of noise, as you'd expect the record has some unbelievable sonic highlights. I'll cut right to the best of the bunch and maybe my favorite song on the entire album Pattern Screamers. It begins with a spacious, fragile passage of soaring strings and angelic backing vocals. But Xandra proves just how fragile it all is by absolutely smashing the serenity with a stunning eruption of noise that feels like glass shattering directly into you skull. The lyrics here are brutally pessimistic as she paints her own pursuit of femininity as a fundamentally empty and broken endeavor.
Elsewhere A Puzzle is one of the most formless songs here quickly devolving into a noise mess. It has an impressive physicality that I find entrancing and it's worth noting how much the album's long periods of silence help the crushing noise they eventually give way to hit even harder. Weaponized Dysphoria is the first point on the album where it sounds glitchy with walls of distortion stopping and starting in rapid fire fashion. The lone lyric on the entire song sees Xandra calling on god to kill the boy living within her, a sentiment matched by the contrast between the song's emptiest moments and it's most chaotically dense.
The album ends off with an absolute monster, the nearly 10-minute-long Impossible Light / Golden Flower. It features contributions from a number of guests including primary vocals from Otay:onii and backing vocals from Liturgy's Haela Raveena Hunt Hendrix. The song pairs Uboa's own lyrics delivered much more directly in intense and motivating language while Otay's are much more naturalistic, grand and projected. As she reaches a passage about letting the heart die so that the spirit may live it starts to match the body viscera of so much of Xandra's lyrics throughout the record. It's a pretty grand experiment that I think succeeds with flying closers and it ends in one of the most violent crushing outbursts of grating sound and cutting lyrics on the entire record.
Impossible Light is one of the best albums I've heard in 2024 so far. In the 5 years since her previous record, Xandra has clearly been through a lot and her return to the Uboa moniker wears all of those experiences and learned lessons on its sleeve. What results is an album that is truly dynamic. Dynamic sonically in the way it deploys quiet and spacious musical passages that make its blistering highs soar even higher, or dig even deeper depending on your perspective. But it's also dynamic in its lyrical content which is hardly a spiral of horrid feelings. Instead its a much more complicated reframing of why those feelings matter, what they mean to us, and how it's possible to see an impossible light at the end of the tunnel despite them. 8.5/10
For more great experimental music, check out my review of Kim Gordon's The Collective
