An Imaginal Diskussion

I believe the children are our future — especially children who subscribe to this site — so when Junior Jefitoblog Associate Michael Hanson big-upped Magdalena Bay's new release Imaginal Disk as the best pop album of the 2020s, I knew I needed to investigate.

(Full disclosure: He may not have actually written those exact words, but they were part of an Instagram story that has been lost to the sands of time, and I'm pretty sure that's more or less what he meant anyway. Moving on.)

Some background for those of you who are, like I was, completely unfamiliar with Magdalena Bay. They're billed as an "alternative pop" duo, which strikes me as a description so loose-fitting as to be just about meaningless; far more useful, IMO, is the knowledge that they list Grimes and Charli XCX among their influences, because that gives you at least a general feel for Imaginal Disk's musical aesthetic. But wait! You should also know that Mica Tenenbaum (vocals, production) and Matthew Levin (backing vocals, production, brass and string arrangements) first worked together as the creative principals in Tabula Rasa, a prog rock outfit they started after discovering they both loved Genesis and King Crimson.

This probably sounds like a wild mess of influences, but it makes sense if you really pay attention while listening to Imaginal Disk. Not necessarily in a strictly musical sense — don't go looking for exotic time signatures or knotty melodies — but in the sense that it's an honest-to-goodness concept album, albeit one whose slippery narrative reach tends to scamper beyond its grasp. The story, so to speak, involves a character named True who lives in a future (or something) where people (I think) have been evolutionarily hacked with the titular disks, which are inserted into the forehead. True goes in for an upgrade, her body rejects it, and she's left to question the nature of her own humanity. (Again: or something.)

This type of outline has been used as the basis for classic sci-fi (Ghost in the Shell, Blade Runner) and also not-so-classic variety (Blade Runner 2049); as often as not, it's simply too goddamn difficult to grapple with a question as fundamental and massive as "what makes a soul" within the space of a film/show/album/etc., no matter how many dazzling visuals are trotted out along the way. And if we're talking about the story side of things, I guess that's how I feel about Imaginal Disk, if only because I never would have known this was a concept album if I hadn't poked around for information about it, and now that I do know, I have no idea what the hell is going on in most if not all of these songs.

Here's the thing, though: Concept albums, generally speaking, are no fun because the music suffers in the artist's attempt to hammer a bunch of square pegs into round holes, rendering the results ponderous and frequently unrewarding. Is Emerson, Lake & Palmer's Tarkus a punishing slog because the band decided to write a 20-minute song about an armadillo/tank who battles a manticore, or would it have sucked regardless of the subject matter? That's a question for philosophers to debate, preferably while they're stoned, but my point is that it's extraordinarily rare that a concept produces enough great songs to justify a concept album. Surprisingly, Imaginal Disk dodges this by situating itself in a thematic framework so abstruse that it may as well not even exist; the songs become the point, and they are, by and large, a lot of fun even if you never know what they're trying to say.

Again, I think you'll hear more Charli XCX than Genesis in here, but Levin and Tenenbaum's love of classic sounds still manifests itself. There are organic instruments in here, for starters — including a fat pile of live strings, which is a real badge of honor in the digital era. There's also the prevailing sense that as modern and dance-driven as a lot of this stuff comes across at first blush, it's really kind of a throwback at heart, by which I mean stuff like "Cry for Me" and "Love Is Everywhere" sounds like it could have been plucked from the sessions for the Xanadu soundtrack.

So is it the pop album of the 2020s? I have no idea, honestly, although the 16-year-old says his vote for that honor would go to Porter Robinson's SMILE!, which I guess is next on my list of stuff to listen to. I can say this much: Imaginal Disk stands as a marvelously head-bobbing argument in favor of the idea that the secret to a successful concept album might lie in making the concept so strange that it doesn't even matter.

Watching: I'm still all in on Bad Monkey (and based on the latest streaming data, it looks like a lot of other people are too). Same deal — on both of those counts — with Season 3 of Industry, which, again, seems likely to scratch your Succession itch if you have one.

Also an entertaining watch, albeit in a far more complicated and toxic way, is the HBO documentary Charlie Hustle and the Matter of Pete Rose, which lives up to its title by offering a rather expansive look at the life and career of the record-breaking baseball hero who became a pariah. The facts of the story are fascinating on their own, but what lends these four episodes an extra hook is the growing, and somewhat sickening, sense that not only is Rose guilty of everything he was charged with and admitted to, but he may very well be (and likely is) a self-justifying, unrepentant scumbag in numerous other ways.

Reading: Ken Pisani's Amp'd: A Novel, a seriocomic novel about a man who's forced to move back into his childhood home after losing an arm in a car accident. There's certainly no shortage of stories about people confronting the disorienting side effects of going home again while in the midst of some life crisis or other, but that's at least partly because there's a lot of universally relatable stuff in there. In what I suspect was an attempt to avoid the overly familiar, Pisani loaded up on quirk with his take on this tale, including giving the protagonist a father who's an Olympic athlete turned hoarder, and a mother who lives in a yurt with a fireman. It's too soon for me to tell whether that was a wise move or it'll start to get grating, but as of right now, I'm enjoying the book.

(Reminder that if you're looking for something to read, you can buy my recently released debut novel, Langley Powell and the Society for the Defense of the Mundane!)