Cindy Lee - Diamond Jubilee Cindy Lee

Cindy Lee is a half-lit fantasy, a scratched memory of desire and loss peaking through a cloak of cloud woven by musician Pat Flegel. In our world increasingly rendered in high definition, Cindy Lee offers glimpses in the dark, half there, never fully knowable.

Ostensibly a feminine alter ego created by Flegel after the conclusion of their group Women, the blurring between the artist’s personas, biographies, genre and voice appears to partly be the point. Flegel presents Cindy Lee in controlled environments, releasing limited physical media runs and streaming with no PR campaigns, no social media roll out and until now on small independent record labels. That was until Cindy Lee‘s new album, Diamond Jubilee, which has in the space of a month now easily overtaken her previous highpoint What’s Tonight To Eternity? in terms of attention. Diamond Jubilee has revealed itself gradually into the public consciousness: a two hour album, it was initially released without fanfare on the Realistik Studios’ Geocities website and then uploaded in its entirety to Youtube. Other than an evocative album image featuring a illustrated Lee against quintessentially North American industrial architecture and short statement about its eventual release on physical media, that was all Cindy Lee was prepared to give.

That and the music. In the avalanche of posts, tweets, takes of both good and bad faith, underground gossip and hubub it’s started to feel that Diamond Jubilee’s Moment has taken flight based on the artists’ anti-PR “album roll out” rather than on what the two hours consists of. On record and on stage Cindy Lee is transcendent in alternating low and falsetto vocal crooning in shimmering ball gowns, a chimera of feminine power and vulnerability. Always experimenting with idioms and musical heritages, Lee often buries the music in tape hiss, analog compression and and a production style that often makes the music feels like it has been discovered underground covered in mould, hanging on for life. For its sprawling length, Diamond Jubilee feels like the most focused and precise Cindy Lee recording to date (which, if the statement accompanying the .WAV files is to be believed, will also be the last). Seemingly recorded over the course of four years, the Cindy Lee celebrating her Diamond Jubilee here transmogrifies 20th Century North American music into a holistic fantasy, bittersweet and transporting.

I was lucky enough to catch Cindy Lee perform a set in London a few years ago at New River Studios. Cindy Lee‘s vocal is always slathered in FX and, stood in a shimmering dress, battling against waves of feedback, the effect was like something beautiful fighting through a storm, the songs – no matter how lo fi or mangled – maybe more affecting because of their struggle through technical difficulties. On Diamond Jubilee though, there’s barely any trace of sonic subfuterage. Instead, Flegel’s incredible talent for songwriting, empathetic but virtuoso guitar playing and melodies shine through the murk. Listening to Diamond Jubilee in one sitting, I’m reminded of obsessing over Dave Godin’s Deep Soul compilation CDs or, more recently, the hefty archive project conducted by the Cairo label of American soul music. In Lee‘s fantasyland, the song structures are classic, the guitar playing is classic, the melodies feel like classics but it all feels like they’re being played for the first time. There is Soul guitar riffing through out, for example Olive Drab ‘s dampened rhythm section-and-string work out feels like 6th generation tape copies of a Stax recording. Always Dreaming or Golden Microphone’s vocal approximates Roy Orbison’s sense of melodrama and tragedy, a ghostly version of 60s teenage heartbreak.

The eponymous song sums up the mission statement, a smouldering Velvets chug and guitar interplay weaving the Cindy Lee fantasy in real time. On Baby Blue, one of many heart-melters here, Lee‘s vocal melts into Flegels over a Memphis session bands work-out in the distance. All I Want Is You’s sea of yearning is a duet between Flegel and Lee, fracturing the very idea of the duet: “All I got is the truth, all I want is you” Flegel and Lee sing to each other before scintillating guitar. There are flirtations with genre, some galloping, glam-adjascent synth (not undiscovered territory for Lee) on GAYBLEVISION or Lockstepp but unlike the fried versions of the past, they’re highly evocative, tight songs here.

Sure, over 32 songs there are familiar themes and melodic fragments, but these overlapping moods and atmospheres conspire to keep the fantasy alive. The fantasy is turned up to breaking point on sweeping closer 24 7 Heaven, a Disney soundtrack moment eroded and weeping. There’s winking self-reference in Demon Bitch, “I was a loudmouth punk.. I was a demon bitch, speaking in tongues,” Lee painting herself as the central character, a monstrous, all-powerful demonic presence at the heart of the dream.

Who is Cindy Lee? Or who was Cindy Lee? Maybe we’ll never know but on Diamond Jubilee we better get used to the fact we’re living in her world.

-MK, originally written for Heavenly Zine #3