It’s been just over a year since Magdalena Bay released Mercurial World, their impressive full-length debut which packed impossibly catchy hooks into a psychedelic blend of synth and dance-pop. The Los Angeles-based duo has spent much of the time since on the road, circling the country with festival appearances and bigger and bigger shows. On Tuesday night (11/15) the band stopped through New York for their largest headline performance yet, a sold-out show at longtime Greenwich Village staple Webster Hall that brought in an eclectic crowd. They shook off the pouring rain from outside and turned in a warm, lively, and at times an entrancing bit of pop performance art.
The night started off strong with an opening set from BAYLI. The rising popstar and Brooklyn native brought a fiery on-stage presence to her genre-bending tracks like “sushi for breakfast” and “into me” which pushed them far beyond the laid-back grooves of their studio versions. By the end of her 35-minute set she had most in the crowd bouncing along with her and waving their arms in the air; she had clearly made some new fans and while she managed to fit in an impressive thirteen songs in the time she had, she clearly left them wanting more.
Soon after, as Magdalena Bay’s Matthew Lewin and touring drummer Nick Villa took the stage, a disembodied robotic head appeared on the back screen, introducing itself as the artificial intelligence “Chaeri” and welcoming the audience to “The Mercurial World”. Singer Mica Tenenbaum, looking like an alien fairy in knee-high white platform boots and a neon green and pink onesie, bounced up front with giddy energy to deliver the album’s title track. From there they took off, and their sound and creative vision came to life quickly and vividly as they burst through a series of Mercurial’s strongest cuts, including the one-two punch of “Dawning of the Season” and “Secrets (Your Fire)”.
Another appearance from Chaeri (Tenenbaum explained that the band is teaching the AI about humanity through their songs) led them into “Hysterical Us”, which featured a standout and unexpected melodica solo from Tenenbaum, who throughout the show perfectly inhabited her role as a prog-pop emissary from the future, speaking as if she’d stepped straight out of a computer game and making perfect use of her headset microphone to skip and dance about the stage without missing a note.
Meanwhile, Lewin could be found switching around from bass, to keys, to guitar, often within the same song, his vibrant playing adding multitudes of new layers to the group’s glitchy sound. For a genre that can often rely heavily on pre-recorded tracks, it was a pleasure to see how much live playing contributed to the group’s sound. The searing guitar parts he added to songs like “Nothing Baby” (off of their 2019 Mini Mix, Vol. 1 EP), “Chaeri”, and “Follow The Leader” brought a crackling electricity into the mix and elicited excited cheers from the crowd as he would slide center-stage to deliver a standout feature or a particularly funky bass groove. Villa’s drumming, highlighted on a jaw-dropping break that led into “Halfway”, similarly added to the level of sonic punch the band delivered, turning their computerized pop into something brimming with life, its energy bursting at all the seams.
Tenenbaum kept up the bit with Chaeri the AI, at one point feeding her secrets submitted by fans (some of which feature on the deluxe version of Mercurial World, while others seem to have been submitted specifically for this show) and later on granting her her very own body (a mannequin with a tv for a head) after Chaeri expressed her desire to dance with the rest of the crowd. They’re not the first group to incorporate something like this into their shows, but blurring the lines between the human and digital feels particularly apt for Magdalena Bay’s music and where it might fall flat for another group, it reads here as a very natural extension of the kind of artistry the band is trying to achieve.
The set was rounded out with a powerhouse performance of “Dreamcatching” that cast the band as silhouettes against the psychedelic projections on the screen as they spun the tune out into a delirious maelstrom, Lewin’s quick synth runs giving way to blistering guitar leads while Tenenbaum’s voice echoed around the room. Chaeri reappeared to instruct the crowd on how to cheer for an encore and after a few short moments, the band returned to the stage to zoom through a trio of tunes, starting with the sexy “Killshot”, into the pumped-up anthem of “Set Me Off” and coming to a perfect close with “The Beginning”, which had everybody dancing even before the band brought it to a stratospheric ending and Tenenbaum commanded the room to jump all together, shaking the floor in ecstatic joy.
Mercurial World might be one of the strongest pop albums of recent years, but what Magdalena Bay achieves on stage suggests that the album is just the beginning. The band brought new worlds of sound, style, and vision into their fold at Webster Hall, and led by a performer as compelling as Tenenbaum one gets the sense that that vision will only continue to reach greater heights. We’ll be watching to see where it leads them next.
