The last time I came to the Brooklyn Bowl, people were bowling during the headliner. No one could dream of that at this show: the pins (and the rest of us) were already clear on the floor. They had a feed of the stage on the screens over the lanes, though, for the dads like mine when I was 16, dragged to shows they didn’t want to go to by children they couldn’t say no to.
Fortunately, nobody could say no to Magdalena Bay as they descended upon Nashville’s Brooklyn Bowl on Wednesday night. The band is well into their Imaginal Mystery Tour, and by now they’ve polished their sets into sheer gooey perfection.
Magdalena Bay is a band definitively on the ascent, and they performed with the comfort of complete self-assuredness in every element of the show.
This run of shows featured Baltimore-based Nourished by Time in support, and he opened the show with his trademark delivery soaked in classic soul, 90s hip-hop, and New Wave influences that evokes comparisons from Yves Tumor to the Talking Heads.
Nourished by Time didn’t say out for long, but he set a strong tone with songs from last year’s acclaimed Erotic Probiotic 2, closing with the newer song “Hell of a Ride,” featured on this year’s Catching Chickens EP.
Soon, the stars would come down to earth.
I struggled the day before the show trying to explain to someone what the band even was – because we have to explain everything by genre or sounds-likes to make any sense of the million sounds we hear now. I settled on electronic-poppy-indie-with-a-rock-ish-lean. But their newest album (Imaginal Disk, a Mom+Pop Music release from August), melds all of that with a prog ethos and an intricately designed concept. Somewhere in the bountiful land of YouTube comments a benevolent thinker said “it’s like Carly Rae Jepsen and Tame Impala went on a magic mushroom date.” Indeed.
Apparently the band themselves want to be called “alternative” more than “pop,” but it’s hard to deny the sheer infectiousness of their songs and performances. They mesh well into the Chappell Roan, Sabrina Carpenter, Olivia Rodrigo milieu we’re in the midst of.
But now it doesn’t matter what genre they are, because they’re about to take the stage… oh never mind, it’s just a soundcheck. We’ve all been duped. Let’s take a moment and look more at Imaginal Disk.
The world can always use a good concept album, which Mag Bay has delivered to us in rare form. This album tells the story, across both the music and three accompanying videos, of an alien named True (who lead singer Mica Tenenbaum portrays) rejecting the titular imaginal disk a mysterious doctor seeks to implant her with; then, her journey of discovering what it means to be human.
Oh wait, wait, here they come now, for real this time. Let us rise and join together, it’s time to meet their brand new image.
It’s all so perfect. Too perfect even, like they’ve been plucked straight from the acetate… am I watching humans or a projection? I almost can’t believe the songs are being crafted in front of me, everything sounds so identical to the record I listened to on the drive there. It’s all so perfect.–
Mag Bay performs the new album in full, with a few breaks in the run for some hits from their prior record Mercurial World and other earlier projects. They’ve adapted the visual stylings of the album’s videos into the stage performance, and it makes for an all-encompassing experience. It only helped that dozens of people in the crowd dressed in flowing blue and white, with angelic wings, CDs and glitter littered throughout the audience.
I didn’t think to start taking notes until about halfway through. Let’s look into the mind of the moment shall we?
40 minutes in: an eyeball twisting rendition of “Tunnel Vision”… cacophony, cascading, she twists and – oh god she plummets, she’s limp over backwards, the strobes blind and the drums – the drums!! This feels like forever… It’s an endless scream and all we can do is smile.
Yet in moments we’re all to life and thrill again, “sing it with me Nashville!” and on into “Love Everywhere.” That’s the same song that they produced for Lil’ Yachty’s 2023 album Let’s Start Here. Incredible.
And oooh it’s a costume change now! It’s exciting apparently, but I’m not sure why… of course!
They’ve ascended, and we’re coming with them.
I’m already telling everyone I know they need to see Magdalena Bay, and if you can’t see them (they have unfortunately already headed out west, and soon they’ll be off to Europe), then at least take a listen to Imaginal Disk. If you listen to it, you’ll have experienced exactly the same emotional highs that I did in that Wednesday night show.
I can’t think of a single better word to describe the trip than magical, ascendant, perhaps even holy. Catch it while you can, before the rest of the world discovers the infinite universe of Magdalena Bay.
