Thoughts on Cindy Lee's Diamond Jubilee
Cindy Lee’s long-awaited new double album Diamond Jubilee arrived unexpectedly online on Thursday March 28th. Patrick Flegel—former frontperson and guitarist of the cult indie band Women and the vocalist and multi-instrumentalist behind the drag pop Cindy Lee project—released the album on their Geocities website for paid download. After you Paypaled $30 CAD to realistikstudios@protonmail.com, you received a Dropbox link to a 1.7 GB folder of WAV files that was Diamond Jubilee. As I have been a longtime fan of Flegel’s work, I immediately transferred them money, and I was able to download the Dropbox file as soon as I got home from work last Thursday in an ecstatic state. Others that arrived to the link later than I did, however, found that it had been locked due to the amount of traffic it was getting, and were unable to hear the album until Pat re-sent the link and eventually hosted the entire record on YouTube (posted above).1
Diamond Jubilee is a staggering 32 tracks and two hours of music. I have heard nothing else this year—let alone over the last four years—that has been both this long and this consistently amazing. Across those four years since the last Cindy Lee release, Diamond Jubilee took on a bit of mythic status in hypnagogic/psychedelic pop circles, and, somehow, the actually released album manages to exceed all of my expectations and hopes for what it could’ve been. Sadly, the album may also signal the end of the Cindy Lee project, according to the way Flegel frames this upcoming tour on Geocities. If that is actually the case, it will be a hell of a way to close this chapter in Flegel’s career.
Given that the record has only been out for five days, I have barely been able to get my head around everything on it. What I do feel—and what I felt instantly from its opening minutes—is that it is a masterpiece of independently written, played, and produced pop music. In a brief piece for Exclaim, Kaelen Bell captures its allure best when he writes,
[b]uilt on strains of '50s girl group pop, lush '60s psychedelia, itchy '70s radio rock, lo-fi '90s clutter and sparkling production choices grafted on from some alternate universe, Diamond Jubilee feels like the defining portrait of Cindy Lee as both artist and vessel. Folding decades of musical forms into one distinctive language, it's difficult to take in the record's entirety in one sitting (at just over two hours, it's about finding the time more than anything else), but the reward for sticking around for the long haul is mighty.
I love Bell’s idea there of Diamond Jubilee “[f]olding decades of musical forms into one distinctive language” and I think it captures Flegel’s masterful touch across the entire Cindy Lee project that comes to full realization on the new album. Disparate aesthetics and bygone eras of pop are miraculously held together in understated but—upon closer inspection—dazzling fashion. If you have checked out Flegel’s occasional radio program for NTS, Realistik Radio, you will know that they are an expert curator of pop music’s vast archive, and this comes through vividly on the new album.
I keep finding these little pockets on Diamond Jubilee where I marvel at an unbelievable set of two or three or four songs, and I think to myself, “God damnit, these might be the best on this thing!” only to remember that I’ve thought that about like four other parts of the album at different moments while listening. Two of my favourite stretches like this so far are “Wild One”→ “Flesh and Blood”→ “Le Machiniste Fantome” → “Kingdom Come”→ “Demon Bitch” on disc one, and “Dracula”→ “Lockstepp”→ “Government Cheque”→ “Deepest Blue” on disc two. (Usually, I would link to all those songs or embed them as videos in this post, but, since I can’t, I’ll just give you the timestamps: “Wild One” starts at 27:44 in the YouTube version of the album, and then “Dracula” starts at 1:03:50.)
This immersive quality makes Diamond Jubilee feel like a truly classic double LP—a sonic place to spend time in and explore, getting familiar with odd little detours and idiosyncratic moments—rather than today’s bloated projects that exist solely to encourage passive listening and to game streaming metrics. It is bold and strangely moving, then, that Flegel has released the album completely outside of the streaming economy, and seemingly has no intention of adding it to Spotify, Apple Music, or even Bandcamp.
I am certain that this short piece will not be my last word on Diamond Jubilee, nor on Flegel’s Cindy Lee project. Diamond Jubilee is easily an album of the year candidate for me. The prospect of listening to literally any other contemporaneously released two-hour long record preemptively fills me with dread and fatigue, whereas I love dipping in and out of this masterpiece. Ones like these don’t come around too often!
In the brief window where Diamond Jubilee was only available via Flegel’s paywalled distribution method, I noticed a bit of grousing from commenters on YouTube and Rate Your Music, which, honestly, drove me up the wall. It was $30 CAD for over 2 hours of music that has been in the works for at least 4 years. What a bunch of entitled little streaming piggies!