Before you even pressed play, Cindy Lee’s Diamond Jubilee took you again in time. When it was launched in March, the one strategy to hear it (other than a YouTube video) was to go to a GeoCities web site – a relic from the 90s web, full with multicoloured Instances New Roman lettering – and obtain the audio recordsdata through Mega, the filesharing service beloved of 00s music blogs.
The music itself went even additional again, and certainly sideways, right into a parallel dimension of Twentieth-century pop: doo-wop, glam, folk-rock, Nuggets-y psych/storage, Velvet Underground-style art-rock, French chanson, basic soul, 60s girl-group pop, synthwave, rockabilly and ambient all function, rising by means of lo-fi manufacturing as if corrupted on its journey from this spirit realm.
Canadian musician Patrick Flegel, previously of the band Ladies, has put out six earlier albums as Cindy Lee, however Diamond Jubilee was their breakthrough, buoyed up by Pitchfork’s highest evaluation rating in 4 years and excitable chatter by followers on Reddit and Charge Your Music. Slightly of the wonderment maybe stemmed from the format of the album: the enterprise of discovering and unpacking the tracks commanded your consideration (it’s since been made out there on Bandcamp, CD and vinyl). And at 32 tracks and 122 minutes, this was evidently a grand and immersive challenge with excessive stakes.
Other than a scattering of contributions from Steven Lind, who additionally combined it, Flegel wrote and carried out all the things themselves, and deepened the thriller by doing zero interviews and chopping quick an accompanying tour. The theatricality of their glamorous drag persona Cindy Lee, singing in falsetto and soulful mid-range, added one other layer of thriller: who was this?
Finally, the sense of occasion got here from how unerringly good the songs are. Diamond Jubilee is a bit of paying homage to the hypnagogic pop of the early 2010s, when Ariel Pink, Gary Battle, Rangers and others additionally appeared to summon outdated pop from a long-decayed FM frequency. However other than the odd gem, the songs from that scene usually appeared so garbled by their passage by means of time that their melodies had denatured. Manufacturing apart, Flegel’s tunes are pristine – these are classics to rival Burt Bacharach, Lou Reed, Sam Cooke and any variety of Twentieth-century greats.
The lyrics, filled with mirrors, moonlight and different symbols heavy with romance, hark again to the miniature love tales that crammed mid-century pop: “A style so candy and simply so refined / I’ve solely received one factor on my thoughts”; “My arms had been open / My coronary heart was stolen / When the tears begin falling / I simply hold rolling.” Regardless of the sound constancy blurring the phrases, the readability of the feelings hit direct to the guts: “All I’ve received / Is the reality / All I need / Is you.”
A part of the joys of this large, various album is having a brand new favorite track each few days. Everybody’s shall be completely different – however the pinnacle for me is the sock-hop groove of If You Hear Me Crying. Flegel-as-Lee appears to carry again with their fairly, trilling verses, however by the refrain they’re admitting to their potential paramour “for those who hear me crying / I solely needed to be heard”. Then comes an electrical guitar, extremely loud and jarringly excessive within the combine, taking part in a euphoric solo. That is how love arrives in our lives: noisy and unstoppable.
In a 12 months when pop was dominated by brash iconography and hyper-specific references, all of it borne aloft on memes and discourse, what a pleasure to have a report located completely exterior that. As Diamond Jubilee performed out by itself timeline, Cindy Lee proffered a velvet-gloved hand, and lifted us out of the actual.
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