You can’t help but marvel at the ridiculousness.
Words: Abigail Firth.
Photos: Patrick Gunning.
To hit play on a Magdalena Bay record is to be transported into whatever alien pop world they’ve crafted for the duration. For their Imaginal Mystery Tour – clearly a play on the Beatles’ Magical variety and seemingly designed under the influence of as many hallucinogenics as the Fab Four were in the late 60s – the LA duo bring to life the bonkers storyline that runs through this year’s ‘Imaginal Disk’.
For their second full-length, Mica Tenenbaum and Matt Levin did a concept album, based around the idea of an invented evolutionary missing link, by which the process of becoming human meant having a disk inserted into your forehead for a software upgrade. Mica’s character in this story rejects the disk, and the album follows her journey of learning to be human. It’s a corker of a sci-fi novel, and works incredibly well when paired with their futuristic synth pop. But what does it look like?
Stepping downstairs into London’s HERE at Outernet, you’re met with a fantastical scene projecting from the screens at the back of the stage; blue skies and a CD sun that, erm, resembles a Beyblade, and two chrome hands reaching out to touch it at either side. On the stage itself stands a magic mirror with angel wings (remember when we mentioned hallucinogenics?).
The album is played in full, in order, for maximum immersion. On opener ‘She Looked Like Me!’, Mica is immediately commanding, with her half-whispered, half-screeched vocals and total theatricality, bounding around the stage and still grabbing focus despite everything else going off on it. The chronological setlist lends itself to an even spread of big moments, like the recent crossover hit ‘Image’ arriving in the first ten minutes, the rock opera feeling ‘Death & Romance’ a couple of tracks later.
Occasional slips into the ‘Mercurial World’, their debut album from 2021, bolster the big hits from their follow up record; the synth disco of ‘Secrets (Your Fire)’ and video game inspired ‘You Lose!’ fill the gap between ‘Image’ and ‘Death & Romance’. Later on, the heavy club track ‘Chaeri’ leads into the disjointed funk of ‘That’s My Floor’ and the equally ethereal, but for very different reasons, ‘Dreamcatching’ and ‘Angel on a Satellite’ are paired towards the end.
The journey is told through increasingly bizarre on stage costume changes, with Mica bounding out in a blue parachute pant number and adorning herself with a sunflower face mask, before switching to a similar red suit accompanied by what can only be described as a fire cape, and finishing the set in a white dress and angel wings. It’s a bit school play, but come on, we’re watching a live rendition of an album that imagines the missing link as an alien, you can’t help but marvel at the ridiculousness.
And that’s the thing about the whole Imaginal Mystery Tour, that it likely would feel a bit corny if it wasn’t backed by some of the most top tier alternative pop to come out of 2024. Beyond all the batshit theatrics there’s every single track’s superblooming crescendo endings, and the intense peaks and valleys of the setlist that mean when ‘The Ballad of Matt & Mica’ comes along to close, it’s genuine euphoria. Walking back up the stairs out of the venue does feel a bit like you’ve clicked your heels and gone back to Kansas.
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