A pairing of metaphors this nerdy – one deriving from the method of metamorphosis, the opposite pulled straight out of the science fiction canon – is par for the course for Matthew Lewin and Mica Tenenbaum, the precocious younger duo that makes up Magdalena Bay. The 2 began out in a prog band in highschool earlier than realizing that no one listens to prog anymore. A minimum of, no one that they cared about. So as a substitute, as they went on to review on the most elite universities in the USA, they dropped their band fully and swapped inspirations from art-rock to Prime 40 radio looking for notoriety. Making synthpop could be easy, they thought – in any case, they’d spent their time writing insane twenty-minute jams moving in and out of 7/4 time, and what’s a brief radio bop in comparison with that?
It may have been that straightforward. However Matt and Mica by no means fairly found the best way to be regular, and finally, it appeared like they didn’t need to. Even on their debut album and (many) different releases, the duo’s pop music paid homage to and subverted the pop zeitgeist in the identical breath. They put Mariah Carey-esque love songs back-to-back with EDM slow-burners back-to-back with shoegaze-y pop rock, stitched collectively by track transitions clean sufficient to make their releases seem extra like megamixes (or, typically, literal “mini combine”es that they launched as EPs). The weather of pop have been there – verse-chorus-verse constructions, hooks that may get caught in your head for months, et cetera – however they have been augmented with one thing extra distinctive and artsy. Name it music idea geekery, or a lingering need to make one thing as grand as their previous work. However no matter that high quality is, it has blossomed to full fruition on their sophomore album: prog-rock or in any other case, that is essentially the most bizarre, complicated music they’ve ever made. Imaginal Disk is a testomony to good old school artistry – it’s the product of a band intensely honing what they need to sound like and ending up with a method so distinctive that it’s barely potential to explain. It’s dorky and unusual and dramatic, just like the duo themselves. And it feels like nothing I’ve ever heard.
Imaginal Disk is held collectively by a free idea: a personality named True being coerced into getting a disk inserted into her head, resulting in the creation of a brand new parallel being. This story is explored extensively all through the surreal music movies launched alongside lots of the album’s singles. However that idea isn’t strictly essential to the album: the band instructed Finest Match that the album is a broad “exploration of self and consciousness” and that the movies’ overarching narrative acts as a complementary interpretation of the album’s themes. By that framing, Imaginal Disk seems to be much less like a sci-fi rock opera and extra like only a assortment of pop songs centered round a standard theme. However the album nonetheless feels like one thing bigger than the sum of its components.
Maybe that’s as a result of the entire album, not like something Magdalena Bay has made earlier than, has a unified aesthetic. That’s to not say that the album is homogeneous – something however. Making an attempt to explain this album by way of its contemporaries, I solely ended up with meaningless phrase salad: Age of Adz-era Sufjan Stevens if he made area rock revival, the Pet Store Boys protecting ABBA, each Kero Kero Bonito track mashed into one. Regardless of that, each observe on Imaginal Disk one way or the other manages to sound like the identical album.
A part of that’s Mica’s distinctively ethereal vocals, a part of it’s the wash of psychedelia that coats each observe in a hypnagogic aura. It’s additionally as a result of all the things on Imaginal Disk, irrespective of the sound, is turned as much as 11. The lyricism is musical-theater ranges of dramatic, and the instrumentals match that vibe – the raging distorted guitars swallowing the combination on “That’s My Flooring,” the crunchiness on the ultimate refrain of “Picture,” the 80s string-synth-drum-machine combo on “Cry For Me”. Magdalena Bay’s previous work had that very same bombastic vibe, however when it’s surrounded by a unified theme and aesthetic, it feels a lot extra gratifying.
As nice as Magdalena Bay’s earlier releases have been – and so they have been nice – they didn’t precisely have a sound, as a lot as they have been good at each sound. In contrast, in press releases, Lewin mentioned that the method of making Imaginal Disk was realizing “what a Magdalena Bay track sounds and looks like.” On one hand, that feels like nonsense, as a result of the album barely has a constant style. Even calling this “synthpop” looks like a disservice. However Imaginal Disk nonetheless looks like a band discovering their voice.
If I needed to describe this album’s ethos, maybe it wouldn’t be that removed from the reality: it’s a prog-rock band making pop music and refusing to compromise on the perfect qualities of both. There are bizarre key modifications and style modulations and grandiose tales packed all through this entire album, proper subsequent to a few of the catchiest hooks of the yr and danceable rhythms and nostalgic 90s-throwback materials. It’s avant-garde, catchy, accessible, complicated, and fantastical, all in the perfect methods. It’s becoming that the album’s organic namesake is a metaphor for evolution, as a result of Imaginal Disk sees Magdalena Bay channeling their overflowing inventive power into one thing novel – in a method, like an animal metamorphosing and inheriting its full physique.
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