Magdalena Bay
Imaginal Disk
Release Date: Aug 23, 2024
Genre(s): Pop, Electronic, Pop/Rock, Alternative/Indie Rock, Left-Field Pop
Record label: Mom + Pop Music
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Album Review: Imaginal Disk by Magdalena Bay
Excellent, Based on 4 Critics
Based on rating 9/10
A pairing of metaphors this nerdy - one deriving from the process of metamorphosis, the other pulled straight out of the science fiction canon - is par for the course for Matthew Lewin and Mica Tenenbaum, the precocious young duo that makes up Magdalena Bay. The two started out in a prog band in high school before realizing that nobody listens to prog anymore. At least, nobody that they cared about.
Based on rating 9/10
Magdalena Bay have always been part pop outfit, part performance art. By the time the duo released their 2021 debut album, Mercurial World, Mica Tenenbaum and Matthew Lewin had been working together for years, both in their teenage prog rock outfit Tabula Rosa and with a series of EPs as Magdalena Bay. Yet for the uninitiated, they felt like they had arrived fully formed, complete with a GeoCities website, a host of tongue-in-cheek surrealist TikToks, and a playful Y2K aesthetic.
Based on rating 3.0/5
Terminably online music The future of pop music is here, and if you take it from Magdalena Bay's Mica Tenenbaum and Matthew Lewin, you'll find that it's still prohibitively slick, still in love with retroism (to their credit, not just the '80s and '90s), still very palpably made in LA, and still intent on blending multi-generational influences for an audience of under-25s. If that's an exciting prospect for you, then fair dos, quite right -- their latest record Imaginal Disk somehow spreads the net wider, blends their sound smoother, and pitches itself younger than ever. It is their best album to date.
Opinion: Excellent
As natives to both the digital world and the prog-rock scene, Mica Tenenbaum and Matthew Lewin, a.k.a. Magdalena Bay, are used to doing deep-dives into the maximalist side of things. The Miami-based duo smashes together a myriad of sounds and playfully gaudy visuals into a big, organized mess, and Imaginal Disk finds them at their most radical. The group's second studio album offers a confluence of ideas that allows for strange detours through a sonic hall of mirrors.
'Imaginal Disk'
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