Uboa
The Origin of My Depression

Elephant in the room. This is the expression used by English speakers to indicate a huge problem, right in front of everyone, that people prefer to ignore, something they're unwilling to talk about.

Depression... what is depression? It is not sadness. It is not being in a bad mood. It is not a futile lament or a matter of will. It is a true disease, a poison, an enemy you think you have defeated, only to come back stronger than before. Depression is lying still on the bed staring into space, feeling emptiness inside. It's the acute awareness that you will never be happy again. It's what makes you hate the morning and long for the evening, for sleep, for the temporary peace from life.

"Come on, you're just sad, cheer up...", "Go out, go to the movies, enjoy yourself, you'll see it'll pass...", "Stop feeling sorry for yourself and live life...". How difficult it is to get inside a depressed person's head. How much incommunicability there is with those who have never experienced such things, who, believing they are consoling and helping, often twist the knife in the wound. And so you smile, because a smile won't lead you to explain what they won't understand anyway. We live in a fake society that no longer accepts or tolerates old age, death, illness, a society of sculpted nudes and plastic, where the disabled, the suffering, the disturbed become the invisible ones...

Until recently, I thought that Uboa was a character from Yume Nikki. Instead, it's also the stage name of Xandra Metcalfe, an Australian girl whose musical project, originally rooted in Doom/Sludge Metal coordinates, has increasingly veered towards Noise and experimental shores.

The cover of "The Origin of My Depression" is a photo taken in the hospital after a suicide attempt. This alone should give you an idea of the work. An extremely personal and suffering work, where Uboa painfully reflects on her mental illness. The opener "Detransitioning" is a manifesto: it starts with a melancholic piano accompanying Xandra's murmurs, evolves into a passage of pure voice, and erupts into Harsh Noise blasts until the terrifying finale. The subsequent "The Origin of My Depression" is a monologue over a Dark Ambient base and an eerie vocal backdrop that explodes into the desperate screams with which the author tries to expel all her shit, her pain. The suffocating unease of "Lay Down and Rot", the frightening vitriolic bursts of "Please Don't Leave Me", the relentless percussion, soul-stabbing of "An Angel of Great and Terrible Light"; all these songs present a climax that well represents depression, where everything starts with an insignificant thought and ends up overwhelming and annihilating. You arrive at the conclusion "Misspent Youth" exhausted, wounded, troubled; ten minutes that paint apathy, sadness, the regret of years that pass silently while others can face and live life.

At the end, after a final piano note, it seems Uboa takes the instruments and leaves. She did what she wanted, what she had to: externalize her inner torment. But what, then, is the origin of her depression? The answer is that there isn't just one: transphobia, discrimination, unrequited love, but above all the socioeconomic alienation due to a sick society.

An album you will love or hate. An album that perhaps should be listened to all at once, in one breath, to experience it. An album where those who have suffered or suffer from depression will find themselves; where the lucky ones who have never experienced it can have an idea of what it feels like.