Album Review : Uboa - Impossible Light (2024)
The older and more educated in music I get, the more I long for artists that possess a creative paradigm that is entirely their own. If it doesn't sound like anything I already know, I’m at least going to be curious about what you do. That's why I first listened to Uboa's The Origin of My Depression in 2019, a record so haunting and harrowing that I can only play it when I already feel certain negative emotions, otherwise it’s gonna trigger them. So, I was excited and apprehensive for her new record Impossible Light.
But Xandra Metcalfe's outdone herself here.
Impossible Light is a less personal album than The Origin of My Depression, but it's more intuitively accessible. It feels weird to say because it's such an unpredictable record, but every track offers its own emotional experience. For example, the opener Phtalates features this quiet, but tense synth and faint 56K modem-like glitches in the background that serve as a mood setter, which transitions right away into the more erratic and confronting Endocrine Distruptor.
Tense synth, echoing chants, glitches and parasite sounds slowly ramp up like a predator sneaking up on you. As Xandra Metcalf begins singing to disembodied strings and commanding drums, the duality between the harmonic and dissonant layers of Impossible Light begin to emerge. It's a recurring theme here. The following song A Puzzle is a lot noisier and disincarnate. It breaks into glitchy, bombastic non-musical moments where Xandra Metcalfe explore the gap between the pain and the hollowness within.
A Puzzle transitions straight into Gordian Worm, an intoxicating mix of horror synth, power electronics and dark ambient. It’s a collaboration with Armenian artist Blood of a Pomegranate, but it's a great example of what makes Uboa's music so unique and intoxicating: it has a transfixing atmosphere, but intense and emotional screaming and bouts of pure chaos. Her music always hard this powerful, cathartic quality to it, but on Impossible Light, it feels like ours as much as it feels like hers.
Pattern Screamers features more or these lingering strings that come and go on Impossible Chaos, like a tinge of beauty and vulnerability on this journey of survival. It's warm and comforting for about half of the song before breaking into pure pain and brokenness. I love how Xandra Metcalfe uses the drums here to create dramatic effect that cuts the song in half. It feels like getting attacked by dark, anxious thought as you were going through a moment of bliss. Not conventionally pleasant, but efficient.
The following song Jawline is a taut, atmospheric track where Xandra Metcalfe is trapped somewhere between oblivion and exhilaration. Her synth work is absolutely monumental on this record. She hits all the emotional nuances needed with well-chosen chord and well-crafted production Weaponized Dysphoria is the angriest song on the record, exploding right off the gate with screams and chaotic glitches, but all that toxicity eventually comes to pass, revealing some sort of peace.
Sleep Hygiene is one of my favorite songs on Impossible Light as it feels like a reward for this emotional tug of war we’ve just been through. Dare I say it’s oddly catchy? It explores an underdiscussed aspect of depression, which is the counterintuitive relationship to rest, but it’s profoundly alive at the heart its torment. The. contradiction between how you feel and what you should do is illustrated through the contradiction betwene the empowering music and the desolateness of the lyrics.
Impossible Light ends with the monumental ten minutes double feature of Impossible Light/Golden Flowers. It features the glockenspiel I liked so much on The Origin of My Depression and brittle spoken word passages. It’s one of the calmest songs on the record even if it’s not totally calm. I feel like it’s where Xandra reconciles with the part of herself that’s always going to be silently screaming inside and find some kind of balance to her life. At least creatively speaking.
*
The closest thing I can find to Uboa's Impossible Light is Spiritual Poison's latest record that came out last fall, but even then it's a lot more confrontational and straightoforwardly pained than the latter. Her music is at the crossroads of so many different subgenres of electronic music and yet, it feels cohesive and entirely hers. Impossible Light feels also opened in her own way. It’s dark, but not as dark as he previous work. The light might be impossible, but it's there and it's not going way.
