Australian electronic musician Xandra Metcalfe launched the project
Uboa with lengthy pieces in a vein that fused
noise, ambient and psychedelic music.
The album Sometimes Light (2010) contains lengthy intense compositions
that tell bleak (wordless) stories of desperation and desolation.
On one hand, Uboa unleashes the
distorted doom-metal with heavily damaged vocals
of Eyes Do Not Belong There. On the other hand, she indulges in
the calm and pastoral ten-minute Seen And Not Heard, reminiscent
(for the first half) of the
stately odes of latter-day Pink Floyd.
The 18-minute Boyeater/Ponydance begins like
ambient music of spiritual exploration but soon a sinister rumble and a woman screaming deep down into the mix open a door into a confused noisescape
of guitar feedbacks, random drumbeats and sobbing/screaming of a ferociously
abused woman. It's a harrowing psychodrama.
She screams out of her head in the 14-minute Event Horizon Girl but this
time the music does not follow through.
All in all, the album is a hell of an experience, the musical equivalent
of skinning you alive.
The album Jouissance (2013) seems like an attempt to recover some
semblance of song format.
Clean vocals and melody appear in Hair Skin Nails (with the epic lyrics "hair, skin, nails, veins, bile, semen, ovum, womb, rectum, teeth, vagina, anus, colon, phallus, eye, lymph node, spine, heart, brain, and no body").
The eight-minute I Will Choke You Until You Like It relies on a repetitive semi-industrial pattern for coherence.
The eight-minute Become Meat builds suspence via slow dramatic beats and nun-like vocals.
The ten-minute I Am Taking All Of You With Me is a melodic shoegazing ballad wrapped in guitar noise.
The 13-minute Jouissance is the demonic (and exhausting) tour de force, a lava-like flow of screams and guitar distortion, but over more regular drumming. The banging and screaming is a bit repetitive for a while but grows to a manic final crescendo.
Except for this lengthy piece, much of the brutal impact of the first album is lost.
She did better with the EPs.
The 22-minute piece of the EP Coma Wall (2015) is her masterpiece:
extreme visceral noise and screaming with dark atmospheres and thundering drums,
a chaotic form of post-metal performed during the
apocalypse by a hysterical and triumphant Lucifer,
a death-metal version of Diamanda Galas;
or Khanate after a really bad nightmare.
and after 15 minute a dirty distorted hissing drone slowly grows into
a stately doom-metal anthem.
The 27-minute piece of the EP Hook Echo (2016)
slowly emerges from a tinkling meditative state
to enter a state of deep neurosis via a titanic tidal wave of noise.
After seven minutes the music starts to wander through a radioactive wasteland,
eventually swept by a sinister wind which morphs into a distant choir
while the guitar weaves a spiral of epic riffs. If this was the resurrection
after the nuclear holocaust, the ending is pessimistic: a sorrowful
requiem-like choir. This is ambient music for disintegrating life
The mini-album The Sky May Be (2018) toys with a
more complex kind of chaos. Uboa has become an artist of sound montage.
The frenzy of these collages is closer to
the psychedelic freak-outs of Red Crayola
of the 1960s
and to Japanese noise-core of the 1980s than
to contemporary digital soundpainting.
The shocking overture of Standards of Living is just the appetizer,
followed by the
carpet bombing of Thigh High Cat Tights, which is basically
musique concrete grafted onto death-metal, ending with the woman shouting over a grand cathedral-like drone, which in turn
segues into the relentless power electronics of
Salivate on Cue
(which ends appropriately with the musician panting in our ears).
Uboa enjoys traumatizing the listener with extreme juxtapositions of moods and tones: compared with the initial tryptich,
I Can't Love Anymore
is new-age music
(acoustic guitars and angelic voices).
The contrasts are particularly haunting (or maybe therapeutic for the artist)
in the four-movement suite The Sky May Be
where gentle motifs morph into industrial madness and then into ear-splitting
hisses (Dementia). A cosmic nebula rises majestic in
Entropy but it is bombarded by all sorts of
monstruous screeching, drilling, hammering noises.
The singer screams like she is being skinned alive while the electronics
apply a scorching-earth strategy. And then suddenly a stringed instrument
intones a gentle Zen-like tune (Extus) interrupted by static noise
of faulty radio transmission and closed by one last desperate shout
(Zenith).
The collaboration with fellow Australian noisemaker Muddy Lawrence (a.k.a. Reece Prain), The Apple of Every Eye (2018), was instead disappointing.
The album The Origin of My Depression (2019) continued in the direction
of a more conceptual (less visceral) sound with increasing computer skills.
Detransitioning weds a gently drifting cosmic nebula with her
trademark electronic landmines.
Her voice whispers in The Origin Of My Depression while another voice
tries to emerge from the quasi-psychedelic quiet and hypnotic Zen-like
percussion until her voice erupts in coarse desperation.
Ghostly voices and confused percussion generate a disorienting vortex
in Lay Down And Rot before her scream rises from hell.
The previous album's game of contrasts continues here.
Epilation Joy is a plain ballad (with harp and bells), whereas
Please Don't Leave Me is a wall of noise (timid by the standards
of her greatest EPs).
In what is perhaps the peak of pathos,
the eight-minute An Angel Of Great And Terrible Light begins as a
slow, martial litany and slowly builds up tension to turn into a grandiloquent
melodrama.
The eleven-minute Misspent Youth takes forever to get going.
It is the most confessional piece, sung in plain clean vocals with
a simple background of drones and piano, and sometimes
it feels like a piano lied.
The EP The Psychoses (2019) contains three lengthy pieces:
Lice and Caviar (9:10),
Null and Void (10:19), and
Entropy and Rose (8:46).
