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 Bandcamp, CD and vinyl). 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 was this?
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. But apart from the odd gem, the songs from that scene often seemed so garbled by their passage through time that their melodies had denatured. Production aside, Flegel’s tunes are pristine – these are classics to rival Burt Bacharach, Lou Reed, Sam Cooke and any number of 20th-century greats.
The lyrics, full of mirrors, moonlight and other symbols heavy with romance, hark back to the miniature love stories that filled mid-century pop: “A taste so sweet and just so refined / I’ve only got one thing on my mind”; “My arms were open / My heart was stolen / When the tears start falling / I just keep rolling.” Despite the sound fidelity blurring the words, the clarity of the sentiments hit direct to the heart: “All I’ve got / Is the truth / All I want / Is you.”
Part of the thrill of this giant, varied album is having a new favourite song every few days. Everyone’s will be different – but the pinnacle for me is the sock-hop groove of If You Hear Me Crying. Flegel-as-Lee seems to hold back with their pretty, trilling verses, but by the chorus they’re admitting to their potential paramour “if you hear me crying / I only wanted to be heard”. Then comes an electric guitar, incredibly loud and jarringly high in the mix, playing a euphoric solo. This is how love arrives in our lives: noisy and unstoppable.
In a year 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 record situated utterly outside that. As Diamond Jubilee played out on its own timeline, Cindy Lee proffered a velvet-gloved hand, and lifted us out of the real.
