Review and Photos – Magdalena Bay at The Commodore Ballroom, Vancouver, Sep 6, 2024
It’s already late. Granville Street is packed and loud, and you maneuver your way through the crowd to enter the Commodore Ballroom, hoping you won’t be late. As you ascend the stairs, a familiar tune is already blaring through the space, shaking the floor and vibrating the walls. “Crap,” you think, they’ve already started.
You persevere. The dance floor is crowded but you squeeze your way past a couple of people and find your sightline. Suddenly, you find yourself on Granville Street again. The show is over.
You regroup and try to remember what just happened. You know you were at a show, but you don’t remember it much at all. It was all a blur. Feels more like a collective hallucination than a concert.
On the bus ride home, your memory starts to return and you begin to piece together what happened. You remember dressing up for a Magdalena Bay concert—yes, that was the name of the band! There were four of them on stage… And the lead singer, she really stood out. Her name was Mica Tenenbaum, and you can picture her dancing and bouncing across the stage for the entirety of the show. There were even multiple costume changes… Huh.
As you focus harder to get your memory back, you try to figure out why this concert felt so different from other ones. You’re pretty sure you transcended your earthly body for a couple of hours, as Tenenbaum and Matthew Lewin—the duo that make up Magdalena Bay—and two other musicians took you on an ethereal space odyssey, across galaxies you could only have ever dreamt of exploring.
Oh, it must have been the visuals! Magdalena Bay didn’t just perform for the audience—they put on a well-executed and planned show, with props, a psychedelic screen and a keytar. A lot of the songs weren’t the most vocally challenging, so maybe it wasn’t Tenenbaum’s singing…
No, you realize, that’s not right. You can picture her belting during “Vampire in the Corner” and how huge the reaction from the crowd was. The vocals were so on point at times that you could hardly differentiate them from the recorded versions of the songs. It was unbelievable. Yes, it was the combination of insane talent AND captivating visuals that made the whole experience feel like a fever dream.
Remembering “Vampire in the Corner” makes you realize you haven’t known that song for very long. In fact, the album they largely based their concert around only came out a couple of weeks ago… How did you know every song, every lyric? How did everyone else in the crowd seem to know them all too? Did we all collectively spend the last two weeks listening only to Imaginal Disk, as we went along with our daily lives? Yes, that seems entirely plausible.
It’s at this point you think to check your phone. You always take photos and record a couple of songs at concerts, maybe you can get some clues from there! Looking through these, you finally determine that this collective hallucination was just a side effect of experiencing one of the most memorable concerts of your life. Magdalena Bay’s stylized electronic pop music took you out of your body, and when you landed back on earth, your brain needed time to parse through what had just occurred. The fresh songs from their new album and the excitement the band seemed to have about sharing it with you, and everyone in the audience, made this an unbelievable experience, and a very unique way to spend a Friday night.
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