The setup for Magdalena Bay’s new concept album, Imaginal Disk, begins somewhere that looks like the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey, except that co-producers and songwriters Mica Tenenbaum and Matthew Lewin have identified the missing evolutionary link connecting primates to humans: an extraterrestrial LaserDisc, inserted into the forehead. When Tenenbaum’s character, True, comes due for a hardware upgrade, her body rejects it. This next part is a little unclear, but according to the band she must then relearn “what it means to be human.” You’ll want to excuse them for coming up with a YA sci-fi paperback’s worth of shtick when they pull off this whopper of a feghoot in track 11: “Feeling DiskInserted?”
Since their inception in 2016, Magdalena Bay have made aqueous internet pop and low-voltage funk full of pinwheeling arpeggios and inside jokes. Imaginal Disk sounds like that, but bigger and punchier—more keyboards! More percussion tracks! Add a string section!! Synth harp!!! The total effect brings to mind ’90s Madchester, the progression of Tame Impala after Lonerism, and peak CD sonics, by which I mean a point in time when record companies were positively rolling in it and backing the production of bangers on the scale of George Michael’s “Freedom! ’90” or New Radicals’ “You Get What You Give”—and the big splashy chorus on Imaginal Disk’s “Death & Romance” sounds not a little like “You Get What You Give.” But as opposed to the traditional big-tent populist come-together anthem, Mag Bay’s project is something like the messy slide of signifiers one encounters scrolling the internet: They warp this fundamentally optimistic musical mode to suit a more cynical and paranoid reality.
“I think what would be a positive thing is if we start to be seen less as a pop group and more like an ‘alternative’ group,” Lewin told The Line of Best Fit recently, citing the band’s distance from any actual pop chart. Can’t blame him for not wanting to sign up for a stan army, though I wonder if Mag Bay aren’t also alluding to a bias of marketing demographics that tends to tip feminine-presenting singers—particularly someone like Tenenbaum, whose style resembles Tennis’ Alaina Moore or Gwen Stefani covering Talk Talk—toward “pop.” Modern pop, though, is the perfect setting for Magdalena Bay: candy floss melodies, sticky hooks, and the creeping sense that all is not well—that no one should be capable of maintaining such shiny happy sincerity in public without some kind of nefarious brain-swap operation happening behind the scenes.
More than the precise details of this story, Magdalena Bay invest in outfitting the in-game world, a flow state experience with a loose relationship to standard verse-chorus structure. “Watching TV” sounds like the theme song for centerpiece track “Tunnel Vision,” five minutes that seem to last longer, teasing their way to an all-out noodle-off that readily evokes Mag Bay’s own history as a left-field pop act fighting its way out from inside a former prog rock band. La-la-la-laser skronker “That’s My Floor” asks: Have you considered accessing a higher truth via the elevator? “I let it open me,” Tenenbaum coos, revolutionizing our perception of lobbies and office spaces.
They’re lucky the greater concept works because not every song totally does. Modular bubble bath “Vampire in the Corner” is more precious than sinister. The Steve Lacy whisper-funk vibe on “Love Is Everywhere” circles outer-ring cantina band territory. Maybe that’s all part of the plot? When Tenenbaum sings things that don’t make a great deal of sense, you wonder whether you’d fare any better if someone hit your brain eject. Lyrics are not necessarily the most legible part of this adventure and I don’t suggest trying to dissect them too carefully—best to keep an open mind about POV. Sometimes Tenenbaum is the voice of conscience and sometimes she’s the replicant. On “True Blue Interlude” she sounds like a spokeswoman for disc-implant procedures: “It’s here. Say hello. It’s you,” she says with the hair-raising certainty of a shampoo voiceover introducing a celebrity’s brand-new face. Later, on “Fear, Sex,” she sounds suspicious of the very idea of the computer-enhanced human: “Shoulda known those dirty bastards/Would put wires in your head.” (They’ve been listening to Pink Floyd.)
In a final wink, the story of True is based on a true story: the journey each of us take to become ourselves. With “The Ballad of Matt & Mica,” Mag Bay license some artistic self-mythology that could pass for the real-life Tenenbaum’s account of how she ended up in Los Angeles, working in show biz with Lewin. It’s a fundamentally happy ending, another factor shifting the aesthetic balance toward pop. As a faintly grandiose electronic-groove-rock album with romantic, slightly overwrought bookending autobiographical set pieces, we might think of Imaginal Disk as something like the candyflipped L.A. version of Bowie’s Black Tie White Noise. (I’d go to that party.) The best part, always, is the way Mag Bay songs work simultaneously on the level of quintessentially “mindless” pop and as a tongue-in-cheek critique—call it an “alternative”—of the same.
