Cindy Lee: Diamond Jubilee Album Assessment

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This can be the best radio station you’ve ever come throughout. Until it’s a number of stations speaking over one another, out and in of vary. Sounds arrive in unusual combos; nothing is kind of precisely the way in which you bear in mind. Did that traditional rock band actually have a synth participant, and why did they decide a patch that appears like a mosquito buzzing by way of an inexpensive distortion pedal? And people eerie harmonies swirling on the outskirts of that last-dance ballad by some Sixties woman group whose identify ends in -elles or -ettes. Did they rent a number of heartbroken ghosts who have been hanging across the studio as backing vocalists? Or are these fragments of different songs, different indicators, surfacing like distant headlights over a hill, then disappearing as soon as extra?

Or possibly that is Diamond Jubilee, the sprawling and spectacular new album by Cindy Lee: two hours, 32 songs, every one like a foggy transmission from a rock’n’roll netherworld with its personal ghostly canon of beloved hits. Like a lot of Lee’s previous work, its religious heart is woman group music, decreased to a single woman and mirrored by way of a corridor of mirrors. From there, it extends towards the far reaches of the radio dial, and generally past: the warped traditional rock of “Glitz,” the fragmented disco of “Olive Drab,” the sunburnt psychedelia of the title observe, the nocturnal synth-pop of “GAYBLEVISION.” “Darling of the Diskoteque” appears like Tom Waits and Marc Ribot masquerading as Santo and Johnny; “Le Machiniste Fantome” like a cue from some fictional Ennio Morricone rating to a movie about Ninth-century monks. However even at its most idiosyncratic, the music conveys the archetypal craving of pop. Practically each tune is a few lover who’s gone, and the dream that their loss—the solitary moonlit nights, the resolve to maneuver on, the resignation to wallow eternally—is perhaps as romantic because the love itself.

Lee is the glammed-up alter ego of songwriter, guitarist, and drag performer Patrick Flegel. In a unique lifetime, they have been the frontperson of Girls, an excellent and risky Canadian post-punk band of the late 2000s. They flamed out shortly after two albums, an onstage fistfight, and the unrelated sudden demise of 1 member, however their spindly guitar traces, asymmetrical rhythms, and surprisingly candy melodies have remained influential on vast swaths of DIY rock. Flegel’s previous bandmates fashioned Preoccupations and shortly gravitated towards the crisp sonics and propulsive grooves of latest wave. If Preoccupations discovered a secure center floor between their previous band’s extremes, Flegel pushed additional out in each instructions, donning a blue bob wig and Nancy Sinatra boots and releasing a sequence of albums as Cindy Lee that set pure pop songwriting alongside confrontational blasts of suggestions.

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