Review Summary: 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. What's not to love?
Pause that thought while we parse the fucker. Why does it seem so baby-faced? Where the target demographic of 2021's
Mercurial World was plainly too young to have first-hand experience of the '80s synth ecstasy underpinning that album, here there isn't even a hint of presumed nostalgia for touchstones as recent as
Lonerism and
Currents, whose mainstream-isation of neo-psychedelia suffuses this record even more than the wholesale Kevin Parker production job on Dua Lipa's
Radical Optimism. Not to endorse a
less I know, the better mentality (
Imaginal Disk compares quite favourably against Tim Impaler and his '70s antecedents!), but this thing's target audience is most likely getting their minds blown like literally never before.
Good for them. The radical optimist in
me wants to commend Magdalena Bay for channelling their myriad inspirations without referential pussyfooting, but they play their theoretically dazzling palette so straight, with such frictionless segues that the bulk of its tracklist pans out as one proverbial thing after another. Take the way "Watching T.V."'s chorus staggers into a T. Rex-esque acid crash (ft. the band's full arsenal of synth pizazz and glit-t-t-t-chz), or how "Tunnel Vision" lays down an increasingly jittery foundation only to crumble into a full-tilt panic attack: these moments, both well handled, could easily have proved defining for any other record, but amidst such slick packaging, one simply nods along impassively. "Killing Time"'s groovy shuffle and early placement net it a (deserved) standout ticket, but otherwise these tracks are scantly distinguished from one another by rhythm, hooks, chords etc., and rely heavily on individual dramatic flourishes for individual impact (per the final chorus in the otherwise unremarkable "Vampire in the Corner"). Such moments are all too easy to keep track of.
Magdalena Bay aren't exactly shy of a direct throwback when it comes to it: "Cry for Me"'s claustrophobic inverse of ABBA's world-beating "Dancing Queen" is nothing if not inspired, every stark gesticulation to the original vindicated by the spades of confidence the duo back it with. It's bold enough to prance from a circumstantial best-track-on-the-album to the splendour of a Towering Highlight, but this citational conviction is broadly lacking across the rest of the tracklist: other moments of intertext are both understated and underwhelming. The disco-ready piano in "Death and Romance" plays more as pop camouflage than a hook in its own right; "Love is Everywhere" takes its core sample from Lil Yachty's "running out of time" and wears it like a retail licence; "That's My Floor"'s verses parallel Lana del Rey's classic "Video Games" with deferential inertia (contrast this against the hysterically irreverent treatment Snow Strippers gave the those same lines in their graffiti banger "Video Games 2" earlier this year – one of these brings out the best of the source text, the other politely exists).
On the level of its pop DNA – which, to me, an album so hell-bent on blending so many different visions of the form begs to be appraised for –
Imaginary Disk is more a near-faultless juggling act than a statement in its own right, but there's simply no getting around the craft and attention to detail that have gone into this thing. Magdalena Bay's production value has always been their strong point, yet in taking a palette at least as broad as on
Mercurial World, augmenting it with the heft of live rock instrumentation (particular credit to session drummer Nick Villa here), and seeing it off with a level of cohesion that you could quite plausibly brand
too smooth for its own good, Tenenbaum and Lewin have ratcheted the bar several increments higher on a purely technical level. Tenenbaum has also upped her game as a vocalist: her waifish exhalations once haunted the margins of each song like a distant echo of Grimes at her most vapid, but here she sets herself out as a key player on- and off-mic, her delivery a driving element of practically every track. Don't mistake this for a full turnaround – her belaboured affectations are often off-putting when privilege her breath and accent over melody as the locus of each hook, as heard throughout the unfortunate single "Image" – but one can only respect this as
her record in way that never quite tracked for
Mercurial World. However ambiguous the presence and personality brought by this group to pop as a whole, she is definitely half of it!
In light of all this competence and growth, it's a headache isolating what ultimately holds
Imaginary Disk back from outright greatness — but for my money, the chief factor missing here, whether as a cogent framing for the frequently stifling levels of artifice of the production or as a centre of emotional gravity to shore up Tenenbaum's more belaboured inflections, is a firm sense of specificity. So much of this record comes off as needlessly vague where it might have landed with pinpoint impact: its palette, as outlined, is a smooth cocktail where it might have played into bold pastiche; its lyrics, though largely based in high-concept sci-fi, do little to convey the ins and outs of its accompanying story-world without wider reference ("She Looked Like Me!" opens the book with a level of detail that demands a full-concept tracklist following it and suffers from not being afforded one) and are indistinct on other terms ("Watching T.V." is a particularly two-dimensional take on its eponym (lyrically, at least)); perhaps most damningly,
Imaginary Disk's tangible engagement with common online-music themes (technology and dissociation, navigating intimacy and self-orientation in a world of distance) also feels oddly cursory, addressing its subject matter without inhabiting it outright.
There are potential workarounds for that lack of depth – lyrics aside, "Watching T.V."'s production does a pretty convincing job of manifesting its own over-stimulated, disoriented premise, and Tenenbaum's in-character narrations on other tracks might have done the trick if they didn't drop in and out of frame so abruptly – but overall, it's hard to pin a more enduring appeal on
Imaginal Disk than the vaporous patterns of gratification that extend so seamlessly, with so suspiciously few alterations from song to song. Perhaps it will be the record to usher synthpop into a new age of high-concept refinement, but for my money this album plays more like a microdose-happy version of Barbieland for dissociated chic and high-concept fanfic. There are worse fates.
