SOUND ADVICE Electric Citizen
Friday, Oct. 8 • MOTR Pub As Electric Citizen prepares to enter its 10th-anniversary year with a European tour already on the books for next fall (presumably a near carbon copy of the one that was slated for last fall and scratched for reasons all too obvious), there have been a number of changes in the band’s extended universe. The most prominent shift in Electric Citizen concerns lead vocalist Laura Dolan, who put the band on the back burner in order to take over her father’s business, Applied Imagination, in 2017, six years after his Parkinson’s diagnosis. Applied Imagination creates scale model environments out of all-natural materials for botanical gardens. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Dolan and the rest of Electric Citizen — her husband and guitarist Ross Dolan, bassist Nick Vogelpohl and drummer Nate Wagner — managed to squeeze in their career-best album, 2018’s Helltown, in spite of her newly minted corporate duties and the time constraints that come with them. Christened after the original 1800s name of the Dolans’ Northside neighborhood, Helltown was Electric Citizen’s most well-received album to date, an impressive feat considering the raves that were lavished on 2014’s Sateen and the slightly more experimental and challenging Higher Time in 2016. Electric Citizen’s secret weapon has always been a brilliant sense of melodicism, accompanied by a gift for writing concise heavy Rock songs punctuated by whipcrack riffs and powered by one of the most intensely emotive rhythm sections in the Metal-adjacent categories. In addition to restructuring her father’s business, Dolan also used the non-touring time of the pandemic to write material for a new album and for her and Ross to construct a home studio. For its first local show in close to two years, Electric Citizen will likely debut some of its new songs alongside the Pentagram-meets-Black-Sabbath faves from the band’s first three releases, but two things are certain: It’s going to be as loud as God’s temper tantrum and you’ll need proof of vaccination or a negative COVID test to get into MOTR Pub. (Brian Baker)
Multimagic
Saturday, Oct. 9 • Woodward Theater Cincinnati AltPop group Multimagic was slated to release its debut fulllength, 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
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Electric Citizen P H O T O : FA C E B O O K . C O M / E L E C T R I C C I T I Z E N
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
SEPTEMBER 29 - OCTOBER 12, 2021
Multimagic P H O T O : FA C E B O O K . C O M / M U LT I M A G I C M U S I C
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
