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happymetalgirl · 2 months ago

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Uboa - Impossible Light

Of all the artists I've reviewed prior, Uboa is the one whose work I have the most unique whiplash with covering. I actually felt compelled to look all the way back to 2019 with my review of her grippingly monumental death-industrial breakout, The Origin of My Depression. It was an album which revolved very harrowingly around the constant and inescapable distress of gender dysphoria, and my review of it of was one of impressed but detached and analytical empathy for the autobiographical struggles that creator Xandra Metcalfe so nakedly and horrifyingly expressed on those songs. For many of the same reasons I don't frequently revisit albums like Lingua Ignota's Caligula and Sinner Get Ready (despite it being my favorite album of 2021), my re-listens have been fairly few and far between for The Origin of My Depression. It is a testament to the emotive capacity of albums like those that with such dark subject matter being so commonplace in metal and listeners like me being largely desensitized to lyrics on depression, brutality, and abject human cruelty that albums about foreign and specific personal experiences like surviving sexual assault and persisting on spite (Caligula) and confronting God about allowing it (Sinner Get Ready) and the inescapable oppressive thralls of gender dysphoria in a virulently transphobic world (The Origin of My Depression) can elicit such heartfelt pain.

A lot has changed since I reviewed The Origin of My Depression. Five years later, revisiting that seminal Uboa album for the first time in at least a year or so and sitting down with its successor, my approach to Xandra Metcalfe's crushing self-portrayal of trans life through grippingly intense music is not, this time, with a detached empathy for the trans struggle.

I do intend to maintain my anonymity and healthy distance on this blog, especially now, but I will make at least one thing about me clear because it is an unavoidable facet of a review of this album by me: I am a trans woman. This was the realization that I came to last year of a clearer vision of myself that upon realizing I wasted no time in pursuing. I consider myself one of the lucky ones, relatively: financially stable/independent, insulated at least partly from the worst legislative actions being taken against trans people, and mightily euphoric, strengthened more than I imagined I could be in my transition.

That said, I still identify, as do most trans people I know and have spoken with, deeply and personally with the intense struggles that Metcalfe poetically details on The Origin of My Depression and this new record, whose lyrics were birthed from a similar time and mind-state to its predecessor. My very fortunate mental and emotional strength in feeling as though I am very much winning the battle against my own gender dysphoria has not precluded me to sitting back and resting on my laurels, but rather has driven me to turn my efforts outward as much as I can toward the war against societal transphobia. So many of my fellow trans people suffer needlessly because of blind, stupid, disgusting hate, and their many heartbreaking stories of being trapped in the throes of dysphoria surrounded and suffocated by ignorant malice fill me with such anger that they are being kept from the fulfillment and joy that I have found in being trans, that they deserve just as much as I do. This album, like a lot of trans art, serves as a plea for compassion and help from those privileged enough to offer it in desperate and exasperated terms and a plea for perseverance in these dire times to all trans people and from Metcalfe to herself.

An emblem of life around the time of The Origin of My Depression, the lyrical content of Impossible Light was spawned during a plateau of a rising wave of anti-trans bigotry, about half a decade or so into the significant increase of visibility of trans people and the mainstreaming of the "trans issue" in public discourse in the 2010's, a discourse full of obvious lies and deception through bigotry disguised as moral panic which largely misrepresented and demonized the trans people who were sidelined in the debate on their own existence. That wave of hate from religious and right-wing bigots has only grown since then, reaching a frightening height in 2022 when Republican congressional candidates and governors made combatting transness the forefront of their electoral strategy for the midterm elections. It was a strategy that wound up failing massively in a way that would push any rational political actors away from it in the immediate future, and yet, despite losing on it, republicans held firmly to the hot potato that just burned them, a grim prognosis of the party consolidating into its most rabid devotees behind anti-electoral fascism driven by transphobic vitriol. The party shifted its losing focus on transphobia back to its winning focus on xenophobia and fear-mongering about immigrants in time to capture all branches of the U.S. federal government earlier this month from the inept and incompetent institutionally entrenched opposition party, but the transphobia never went away, and the American conservative movement's most devoted believers have been licking their lips and champing at the bit to see their most evil wishes come true for trans people through the authoritarian action of the coming administration. As a time capsule of sorts of the bleak environment of 2018, this is the even bleaker world that Uboa's next album was delivered into, and yet somehow, it's perfect for the world into which it emerges.

Impossible Light is about reaching for the unreachable: joy in a world of misery, self-worth amid ubiquitous denigration, womanhood from manhood, love in a world of hate. Created at a time when the light was at least visible and now released into a time of seemingly absolute darkness, Uboa's message might seem near-prophetic, and given the insight she expresses in the album's liner notes into the rising tide of fascism sweeping through her own home town in Australia, I imagine she probably had a feeling it was always going to go like this. But the reality is that for trans people, that light has always felt distant, if not outright unreachable; we've always weathered difficult times, we've only ever known struggle, making the essence of Impossible Light, sadly, evergreen. But the caveat to that is that so are we.

As with its predecessors, the musical content on Impossible Light is befitting of its subject matter and context: eerie darkwave ambiance with melancholic low-hummed vocals, jolting blasts of harsh noise, and existential screams of rage, agony, ecstasy, euphoria. Cavernous drones through ambient darkness become suddenly claustrophobic storms of distortion, white noise, and screaming, with "Phthalates" setting the tone via wavering hums of low-register synth hovering over the sounds of destructive industrial clanging of metal. It's very much got the feeling of the opening of an A24 horror movie. The smooth segue into the building, pounding drums over the melancholic singing of "Endocrine Disruptor" is thematically fitting and serves as a great dual opening to the album, with Metcalfe's vocals dripping with disregard serving as a representation for a lack of care for a world with a lack of any benevolent care for her. But the album's apathetic tone does not last long as the blasts of harsh noise and scratching/scrpaing industrial dissonance erupt from the brief but colossal "A Puzzle" and while a djent rhythm of all things rides the tempestuous waves of synthetic distortion and rattling drum-programming on "Gordian Worm". And all of this occurs seamlessly as a deranged progressive suite over the first 18 minutes of the album's four opening tracks, which I love as a representation of the ceaseless mental and emotional chaos of navigating the internal and external highs of euphoria and lows of dysphoria, an ethos that persists through the haunting dark of "Jawline" and the careening explosions of warping noise on "Pattern Screamers" and "Weaponized Dysphoria". It might seem from a cursory listen like it's all just kind of aimless madness and uncontrolled neurodivergent mania... until it all comes together.

While the minutia of the lyrical content is indeed very insular and contained within the trans world, the broader fighting spirit is subtly brimming from the overarching themes and emerges more stoutly as the record progresses, though not linearly and not without constant, dramatic, human flux the entire time. The mood of the album is indeed all over the place from the lofty objective of gender abolition being analogized through the fantasy of estrogen-driven mutation of "god's" nature through pollution on "Endocrine Disruptor" (an analogy for trans people's presence within the cis-heteronormative/patriarchal hegemony as inherently disruptive) to the dissociative respite of "Sleep Hygiene" that sees Uboa tempted by a return to suicidal ideation through indulgence in the escape of sleep. The album is definitely representative of a relatable and chaotic mind state very common to the trans experience, but Metcalfe brings the crucial message of queer perseverance home, with a little help from her queer friends, on the closing track, "Impossible Light / Golden Flower", which very fittingly follows the emotional exhaustion and the dejected repetition of the despondent mantra of "stay in bed" with the simple and potent singular counter of "get up and run". All the afflicted screaming, heartbroken pessimism, and dysphoric depression of the previous tracks and the catatonic escapism of "Sleep Hygiene" are brought to a beautiful and breathtaking crescendo of hope and love on the closing track's glorious multi-stage swell of a choir of organic and emphatic trans voices and catharsis through persistence and euphoria. It's the rebutting of the social narrative of transness being a curse and trans people being the shame and weakness and rot within civilization to be purged with the converse of that fascistic narrative: that in the face of so much hate and opposition trans people are strong, that being trans in a world that represses us is worthy of pride rather than shame, that being trans is a blessing rather than a curse.

It is a time of limbo for trans people now. We've never had it particularly easy as a group, and while the increased community and allyship we've found as of late has served a benefit, the past several years under the scrutiny of the cis-normative lens have been especially volatile. Republicans turned their focus back onto racialized people to win the general election, but the transphobia never withered, it only went quiescent. Even before it became an issue that directly affected me personally, I had kept up with and continue to keep up with the rise of American fascism in the republican party. Consequently I've heard a lot of Donald Trump, unfortunately, half the time at one of his many rallies, rambling like a sundowning racist grandparent about "what they've done to our country" and how unfair everyone is to him. And I have noticed, amid the dull, numbing rambling from the podium about his many grievances that becomes tedious even to his devout cultists, the reliable and resounding Pavlovian response he gets from the crowd whenever he makes some reference to anti-trans sentiment or aspirations. It is indeed a time of very anxious limbo for trans people now that the worst premonitions of a future second Trump administration have become a very possible reality, especially racialized trans people, trans kids, and trans people living under republican governors. And in a time of stockpiling HRT and scrambling for passport applications while the neoliberals who failed to defend us prepare to throw us under the bus for their loss, the plea to stay awake and keep ahead toward the impossible light at the end of the suffocatingly dark tunnel is a more desperate one than ever. Hope is scarce and reaching that increasingly distant light within our lifetimes definitely feels impossible.

But

Why should we languish and doubt ourselves? Are we not strong? Have we not already transcended and defeated gender itself? Have we not already turned over the impossible weight of millennia of gender paradigms? Trans people are so strong! The light of being who we are is already an existentially massive feat, and we are less alone in the glory of gender transcendence than ever. Why CAN'T we reach the light of simple human joy?

With the physical record, Xandra Metcalfe included a small sheet with liner notes delving into the origin of Impossible Light and its contrast to The Origin of My Depression. In it she discusses the necessity of reaching for that impossible light with motivated hope in sharp contrast to delusional optimism and toxic positivity, and in succinct terms the imperative for queer people to do so together, not alone, in community, as she does on this record in participation with other trans and non-binary peers (Tig Harutyunyan, Haela Hunt-Hendrix, otay:onii). She also directs her focus on the primary driving root cause of the suffering and bigotry in the world, capital, and the need for the few of us to act in solidarity in the face of poverty, genocide, climate destruction, apartheid, and fascism. During the time this record was put together, Metcalfe attended multiple funerals for trans friends, and the final touches of the album were done in the midst of the genocide of the people of Armenia in Artsakh by the state of Azerbaijan and the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza by the state of Israel, and Metcalfe writes about the much of the grim civilizational ills surrounding these injustices in very similar ways that I have found also myself writing about those same omnipresent ills and in a similar way that I'm sure millions have also found themselves thinking about them, with a deep sense of daunted uncertainty in even the near future. These liner notes were surely written before November 2024, but the message within them has only become more poignant.

Xandra Metcalfe's plea for collective strength among trans people is more important now than ever, as we face down the last months before heading into a fascist administration that will either moderately target us with discriminatory legal and executive action or severely demonize and scapegoat us for the pain they are about to worsen on the poor and working class people of the US and the global South through escalated parasitism of the less powerful to increase even further the concentration of wealth into the hands of the already-wealthy via a gutting of the social safety net and destruction of public communication and education. Now more than ever, we need each other.

Of the many changes I have made in my life, transitioning has been far and away the best change I have ever made. The clarity I'd never experienced before, the weight of masculinity that I was convinced for so long I just had to carry lifted off my shoulders, the euphoria of self-realization in embracing womanhood, the confidence in reaching and becoming the person I want to be even when she seemed too far beyond my grasp. It's a very strange dynamic to have that euphoria also tied to such fear of increased discrimination, of increased harassment, of being scapegoated for the ills of capitalism by capitalists, of being scapegoated for the failures of the neoliberal paid opposition party, of targeted violence, of losing it all. It's strange and disheartening to see the quick return to silence from the privileged moderate liberals who lamented Trump's electoral victory. It's strange to go to work and act like everything is fine and normal for the benefit of the same corporate bosses who threw their support behind a fascist movement that dehumanizes me to pad their bottom lines and who also plan to throw me away as soon as all the value from my labor can be extracted. But it's also strange to feel such motivation in the face of unwinnable odds. It's strange to feel such self-love and self-confidence that I never felt I deserved before. It's strange not being crippled by depression because I finally found and conquered the origin of MY depression. I have been much more hopeless in the past than I am now, and I know that I'm not alone. This album is not just a reminder that we need each other, it's a reassurance that we have each other, there are people like us who understand us. But even before that, it's a contrast to the search for an escape from the misery of the transphobic world through self-isolation and suicidal ideation of The Origin of My Depression. The thesis of Impossible Light is that there is no peace in suicidal acquiescence, no peace in defeat, and probably no peace ever for trans people, but that the impossible is worth the reach, that if you're going to be alive as a trans person then you may as well live fucking vibrantly, that there's some good in this world for us, and it's worth fighting for, and we have to do it together.

Trans liberation now.

MY album-of-the-year 2024

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