Uboa - The Origin of My Depression

Uboa is an experimental and rather prolific noise project began by Xandra Metcalfe in 2010. I caught wind of this album here a few weeks ago through a few people comparing it to Lingua Ignota’s work, and while I can indeed see the similarity in the album’s harsher, shouted segments and the candid lyrical content, this album doesn’t quite take that dive into the neo-classical that Lingua Ignota often does. If anything, I find myself more frequently reminded of the funeral soundtracking melancholy of Anna von Hausswolff by the uniquely meditative instrumentation used on this album to conjure it’s dark ambiance. But comparisons to contemporaries aside, The Origin of My Depression is an album that can certainly serve as potent dark ambient noise to scratch that itch, but with caution, as a more meditative look into this album and a focus on its lyrical content will reveal a potentially disturbing and tragically relatable expression of its creator’s titular mindset that shapes this album’s genuine and harrowing narrative surrounding gender transition, dysphoria, and trying to experience normal human love amidst it.

The album spends most of its time delivering somber, seething testimonies of detachment from one’s own body, one’s own surroundings, and the seemingly futile effort to find joy in one’s true self through the usual mechanisms of darkwave. The way Metcalfe works with the textures of droning vocal wails and darkly ethereal synth ambiance though intriguing compositions that balance natural flow and surprising instrumental diversions, though, really sets this album apart from so much of its neighboring crop.

While songs like “Detransitioning”, “Epilation Joy”, and the title track mostly base their open introspection on warped ambiance, echoed vocals, and melancholic piano motifs with the supplementation of wood chimes here and there, it’s the violent explosions of screamed vocals and harsh noise like those at the end of the title track, on “Lay Down and Rot”, and on “An Angel of Great and terrible Light”.

The album’s harshness is at its most extreme on the Prurient-esque “Please Don’t Leave Me”, whose suddent burst of the album’s harshest and most distorted noise and jolty screams crescendo horrifyingly into a well-incorporated sludge metal guitar section at the end. And the longer song “An Angel of Great and terrible Light” makes a more patient, yet similarly accomplished build to a metallic guitar climax through a hypnotic beat that ascends through melodic wood chimes slowly into harsher and harsher noise.

While the closing track, “Misspent Youth” may be more of an extended somber darkwave piano coda for the album sonically, its lyrical content surrounding the feelings of a huge, important portion of life being wasted as an identity Metcalfe isn’t is some of the album’s most potently heart-wrenching, in which Metcalfe expresses an acceptance of life as a condemnation to hell with her dysphoria, but that she will accept this hell as long as she gets to be a woman in it as opposed to whatever alternate option exists that keeps her from that expression of herself.

Indeed, this album is one that deserves to be appreciated at both the lyrical and instrumental levels. Metcalfe has constructed a fearsome and compelling self-portrait that details the torment of the experiences of a very often depresssion-inducing condition (exacerbated by the wide social rejection of its expression) that has only recently begun to be recognized and addressed on a more mainstream scale. And she has certainly channelled those experiences into a genuinely harrowing musical experience that balances the unwanted catharsis of anger and the desperation to escape the agony of having to repeatedly seek temporary peace through it.

Empathize cautiously/10