- Uboa’s last EP, The Sky May Be, featured a single, Thigh High Cat Tights: a brief, stunning sucker-punch of digital hardcore, power electronics and old school noise that might lead you to pigeonhole Uboa right at the most extreme end of the noise genre’s spectrum. Yet you’ll find Uboa is capable of surprising in other ways than that: as the soft, gentle opening to her latest release, The Origin Of My Depression, abley demonstrates.
The thing I found really surprising about that track, Detransitioning, is that it horrified me more than any gout of noise ever could. The offkey but reverberant piano and Xandra Metcalfe’s husky, whispered vocal melt into each other, indistinctly, making you strain to hear, until the phrase, “please don’t hurt me” cuts through, unaccompanied. The song’s described in the liner notes as a depiction of ‘trans people detransitioning to escape the misery of oppression’. I’m not sure, maybe I’m being melodramatic, but I find it chilling. It sounds like someone lying on the floor after taking a beating. The track suddenly opens up into keening vocal ambience, skittering, improvised percussion and a rainbow harmony of background synth; a closing wail of pain and loss.
Interestingly, the sound and fury of Origin, of which there’s still plenty, serves to obscure some of Uboa’s impassioned illustration of her experience as a trans woman. She’s much more brutally clear in describing the EP in its press-release. Quote: “The cover was taken during a stay at st. vincents hospital after a suicide attempt, each of the other songs tell a differing aspect of my depression - right what it says on the tin.” End quote. I found myself trying to decipher the lyrics of The Origin Of My Depression -a litany of symptoms in search of a root cause- “Poverty is not the origin of my depression / Awkward social interactions are not the origin of my depression / You are not the origin of my depression." Then everything dissolves into throat-tearing, cathartic screams, recalling the work of Pharmakon, again. I can’t make out what she’s roaring at all, but I suppose the difficulty, the lack of connection in itself, is true to the experience of a trans person.
The EP confounds the noise tag again, taking a turn into surging tunefulness on Epilation Joy thanks to what I think is lap harp and Japanese bells in a chaos of harmony. The lyrics are still unrelenting, featuring snatches like “got a cancer for you.” It’s moments like this that again demonstrate Uboa’s sophisticated approach to extreme music, mixing her wide-ranging palette into new and unexpected formations. However I think this is most true of the EP’s latter half, beginning with the eight-and-a-half minutes Uboa reserves for explaining how she feels about God’s plan, the church and a certain brand of ‘abusive love’ on An Angel Of Great And Terrible Light. Featuring more of those bells and even an acoustic guitar, the pretty harmony is given a rigid, claustrophobic skeleton as a drum beats, unforgivingly, on the one of a two-four bar, nearly the whole way through. It builds into distorted, doom-ish, electric guitar and layers on screaming until the whole thing reminds me of the crushing inescapability of Swans or, perhaps, the most savage post-rock song of all time. Unbelievably, given its monumental size, this monster listens easily enough to be a radio single: this really is a nuanced approach to extreme music.
Speaking of post-rock, Misspent Youth mumbles out regrets about not coming out as trans early enough, even if that would have been a disaster, with more of that honky tonk piano, lonesome, pure guitar notes and choral harmonising, all of which has me reaching again for Julianna Barwick, Jenny Hval or even Sigur Rós comparisons. It’s an unexpectedly beautiful if shapeless eleven minutes to end Origin.
The prolific Uboa is self-releasing The Origin Of My Depression: just something she had to ‘get off her chest’, you can understand why. Later this year she plans to release an album-proper on the label she hooked up with last year, Art As Catharsis. If this record is just a reflex gesture, that can only bode well for the forthcoming release, even as this one shocks and impresses. Uboa continues to be one of the most productive, diverse and interesting artists in noise and many other genres.
- Chris Cobcroft.