Patrick Flegel's Cindy Lee project releases a genre-bending album that transports listeners to a world of 20th-century pop influences.
Before you even pressed play, Cindy Lee’s Diamond Jubilee took you back in time. When it was released in March, the only way to hear it (aside from a YouTube video) was to go to a GeoCities website – a relic from the 90s internet, complete with multicoloured Times New Roman lettering – and download the audio files via Mega, the filesharing service beloved of 00s music blogs.
The music itself went even further back, and indeed sideways, into a parallel dimension of 20th-century pop: doo-wop, glam, folk-rock, Nuggets-y psych/garage, Velvet Underground-style art-rock, French chanson, classic soul, 60s girl-group pop, synthwave, rockabilly and ambient all feature, emerging through lo-fi production as if corrupted on its journey from this spirit realm. Canadian musician Patrick Flegel, formerly of the band Women, has put out six previous albums as Cindy Lee, but Diamond Jubilee was their breakthrough, buoyed up by Pitchfork’s highest review score in four years and excitable chatter by fans on Reddit and Rate Your Music. A little of the wonderment perhaps stemmed from the format of the album: the business of finding and unpacking the tracks commanded your attention (it’s since been made available on streaming platforms). And at 32 tracks and 122 minutes, this was evidently a grand and immersive project with high stakes. Aside from a scattering of contributions from Steven Lind, who also mixed it, Flegel wrote and performed everything themselves, and deepened the mystery by doing zero interviews and cutting short an accompanying tour. The theatricality of their glamorous drag persona Cindy Lee, singing in falsetto and soulful mid-range, added another layer of mystery: who is this enigmatic figure weaving such sonic magic? Ultimately, the sense of event came from how unerringly brilliant the songs are. Diamond Jubilee is a little reminiscent of the hypnagogic pop of the early 2010s, when Ariel Pink, Gary War, Rangers and others also seemed to summon old pop from a long-decayed FM frequency
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