Cincinnati AltPop group Multimagic was slated to release its debut full-length, Manic Daze, in April 2020. COVID obviously had other plans, and the album drop and associated release show were canceled.
The band, fronted by singer/songwriter Coran Stetter, ended up releasing Manic Daze in September 2020, garnering positive reviews from CityBeat and other outlets. Now, the group is finally ready to take the stage at Woodward Theater.
“Like most every band who made the decision to release music last year but not tour, our biggest concern was the safety of friends, family and fans,” Stetter says in a release emailed to CityBeat. “Now that Manic Daze has been out for nearly a year and we’ve all been vaccinated for COVID-19, we’re excited to celebrate.”
Multimagic broke out in the middle of the last decade with a ton of buzz and promise, scoring high-profile festival spots, acclaim and plenty of fans. But the band’s path was altered when, in 2017, Stetter suffered a health crisis — the result of “a misdiagnosis and over-prescription of Prednisone and Codeine” — that triggered a severe manic episode and landed the musician in the hospital.
As a result, Stetter says he lost friends and his Multimagic bandmates, leading him to scrap the album they’d been working on. But it didn’t take too long for him to rebuild the band, which now features Meg Kecskes (keys, vocals), Anthony Maley (bass), Jimmy Ruehlman (guitar) and Evan Brown on drums.
He also recaptured Multimagic’s momentum — while working on Manic Daze, the band honed its live show on a tour with Texas band Wild Moccasins and played sets at the Bellwether Music Festival and Cincinnati’s massive BLINK fest. They tweaked the old songs that complemented the new ones, and ultimately collected 10 solid tracks for Manic Daze, bristling with the muted joy and dark abandon of 1980s Synth Pop and contemporary Indie Rock. The Woodward show also features solo work from Christian Nicholas Gough (Moonbeau, The Yugos) and Cincinnati producer Bershy.
Doors open at 7 p.m. Oct. 9. Woodward requires all concertgoers to provide proof of a vaccination or a negative COVID test result from within 72 hours of the show.
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