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Is it possible to create music that sounds like it belongs simultaneously to a distant future and to your own childhood? Apparently, it is. Magdalena Bay have come into their own in a generational way on sophomore album Imaginal Disk, a perfect balancing act between wearing their influences on their sleeves and pushing the envelope on pop music. Hell, even to call it pushing the envelope is underselling it. They’ve cut up the envelope and made an origami discman out of the damn thing.
Mica Tenenbaum and Matthew Lewin, the duo behind the name, originally met while studying music in Miami and started a prog-rock band before eventually forming Magdalena Bay. The prog roots are evident all over the album, with extremely strong and sometimes vaguely confounding production choices and song structures that are willing to diverge heavily from any rigid verse-chorus-verse nonsense.
However, any pretension that is often associated with prog music is completely absent here. There is a healthy respect and admiration for femme-vocal pop music that spans the history of the genre, from ABBA, to Cyndi and Madonna, all the way through to Britney and Christina and even more modern icons such as Caroline Polachek. Fragile and wispy talk-sung vocals often sit next to, or even crash into blaring club synths that sound like they belong on a Daft Punk deep cut. It is an album that (rightly) prioritises fun and danceability over intellect, and yet is all the deeper and richer for it.
To paint a picture of how the influences grapple with each other and synthesise into something wholly new, you only need to look at the lead single, Death & Romance. It leans on this stumbling piano intro that sounds undeniably Fatboy Slim, but once Mica’s vocal waltzes in like something from a late 90s Kylie album and the extremely fuzzy (bordering on Kid A fuzzy) bassline comes and lays down over everything, it transforms from the sum of its parts into something greater, a greater that is equally unique, catchy and perplexing.
A true triumph of fun, movement, and oddly satisfying juxtaposition, the album is an excellent example of why any sweeping dismissal of pop music for being banal or bland is ridiculous and simply cuts you off from swathes of the most interesting music being produced today. Recommended for anyone who is big on enjoying being alive.
