My Heartbeat Is In My Feet

Magdalena Bay “How to Get Physical”

Last year Magdalena Bay released an excellent song called “Only If You Want It” which sounded remarkably like Britney Spears in her prime and pushed the obsessive feelings at the center of many of Spears’ major hits to an absurdist extreme. “How to Get Physical,” from their new EP, does a similar trick – it has the sound and feeling of Kylie Minogue at her early 2000s pinnacle, but swaps out the casual lust and slick confidence of that music with a neurotic insecurity. Mica Tenenbaum’s voice matches the joyful/serene cadences of Minogue, but her lyrics describe a scene of feeling total cluelessness as she tries to figure out how to be seductive while dancing with someone but deciding that it’s for the best if she just lets them take control rather than potentially humiliate herself by making a move. I like the way this song places itself in the gulf between the idealized situations of pop songs and music videos and the actual lived experience of awkward, ordinary fans. How many pop songs have you heard where the vocalist is singing about the freedom of dancing? This is just the opposite, where the hook is a shrugging admission that she’s not “made for dancing” at all, so now what?

Buy it from Bandcamp.