Impossible Light (studio album) by Uboa

My favourite thing about music (and art more generally) is that it can reach out to and express places where language falls short. For years, Xandra Metcalfe has been the absolute greatest artist in expressing the extremes of negative emotion this way. It's not always an easy listen, but there's been a truth to what's expressed by bursts of noise, muted screams, intakes of breath, beautiful but distant melodies and the sounds of creaking and breaking in the background. I imagine that a lot of your reaction to her work will be somewhat dependent on the experiences you've had, I can confidently say that she's been the most important musician to me for some years. This newest record marks the biggest change in tone in her work to date. The harshness is still as present and well expressed as ever, but it's joined by something more positive, a fragile sense of hope in a cruel world, a recognition of the strength it's taken to get this far, and impossible light.

As I understand it, Impossible Light has been recorded, or at least written, over some years. Some of these tracks feel closely related to Uboa's late 2010s output. The building atmosphere of Endocrine Disrupter is like a more dynamic take on 2019's An Angel of Great and Terrible Light and A Puzzle would not stand out in the brutal early section of The Sky May Be. The attention to detail on all these tracks remains one of their strongest qualities, I've always found that it's the stuff on the edges that really elevates Xandra's work. There's also the same poetic quality to the lyrics, in that they can be hard to make a literal sense of whilst still evoking emotions and reactions in the same way as the music itself, I don't always find them easy to make out so it's worth looking at a lyric sheet on at least one listen.

So far all the good things I've had to say about Impossible Light could apply just as much to Xandra's previous work. There are differences to be found across most of the tracks, for example everything sounds a bit cleaner than I'm used to, it takes away some of the rawness but works well for these tracks. The main differences really come at the end, particularly on the final track. The multi section composition of Impossible Light / Holy Flower is more reminiscent of the longer tracks that Xandra tend to contribute to EPs than anything off of here studio albums and its collaborative nature also calls some of those EPs to mind. The track itself though is unlike any of that earlier work, it might be her greatest triumph as an artist. The gentleness, the sense of wonder and the sheer beauty of it go beyond some of here best work. I can't even really describe the effect of some of the moments here, the introduction of otay:onii's (she's also had a great record this year, check it out) spoken word section and the way it unifies with the song's key motif some moments later, the transition from spoken word to sung vocals and the explosion of sound it culminates in. They're like nothing I've heard before and again, they're reaching to an emotional state that can't really be described. Maybe all I can say is that there's a lucidity to it that there very deliberately seemed to not be in similar moments across other albums (the main example is probably the early section of the title track of Origin which has a surface level gentleness which is made unsettling by the light headed feel of the track), it's a wonderful progression in the narrative surrounding the project, pulling it out of the abyss. It can be hard to be inspired in a world that feels so brutal and sardonic, it makes work like this so precious.