Release Date: March 29, 2024
Label: Realistik
Length: 122:09
Produced By: Patrick Flegel, Steven Lind
Rating: 7.5
Review by: Alexander Hellene
Highlights: “Glitz,” “Flesh and Blood,” “Stone Faces,” “Dracula,” “Wild Rose, ” “Lockstepp”
Cindy Lee is the drag alter ego of Canadian musician Patrick Flegel, formerly of the band Women and now based in Durham, North Carolina. A surprise drop onto YouTube and a Geocities site where it is available for download and/or purchase, Diamond Jubilee is Flegel’s seventh album, 32 tracks spread across two “CDs” that feels like a transmission from an alternate timeline where unfashionable shuffle beats and sunny AM radio pop coexist with tremolo guitars and the occasional funky bassline. Slapback echo and delicate arpeggios, songs about love and loss and wandering the plains sang in a distant and double-tracked, reverb-soaked androgynous falsetto. At least, that’s what I think the songs are about, since Flegel’s vocals are hard to understand. Whatever he’s singing about, I get the sense of driving across the American southwest, saying hi to the cacti and the odd bovine skull, all picked over by the local carrion eaters, on my way to the west coast. Sunshine and blue ocean lay ahead, but for now we’re traveling, baby, running away from our past into something, hopefully, better. These are torch songs for spiritual pilgrims, born consumers only just feeling the sense of something bigger, a callback to a different time. Maybe that’s why Diamond Jubilee has resonated so deeply so quickly.
Anxiety, of course, our omnipresent modern friend, takes center stage on some tracks. Is “Stone Faces,” perhaps, about the pressures that come with any modicum of fame?
I looked around, and what did I see?
Stone faces staring back at me
They saw me on the cover of a magazine
And now these people want a piece of me.
“I was a loud-mouthed punk,” Flegel sings on “Demon Bitch, “Just flexing hard luck/I was a demon bitch/I was speaking in tongues/I’ve been searching, searching/I was a foolish clown/Anywhere but here/I put my burden down.” An allusion to his own musical past? Perhaps. But with an artist as refreshingly inscrutable as Flegel, it could be about anything. It could be about all of us.
Diamond Jubilee has been hailed, if I may paraphrase, as life-changing and the best record ever, if YouTube comments are to be believed. I think that is overblown, but this is an interesting album and I’m glad that it exists. Flegel has created something warm, something that just sounds pleasing to the ear. The lo-fi quality is the point, elevating songs that would otherwise not land the same way into something capturing the magic of the 1950s and 60s with a little European flourish thrown in for good measure. The drums sound like they were recorded in the bathroom of a college dorm in 1957 somewhere two towns over, when the songs even have percussion; most involve Flegel’s voice, many layers of his guitar, and some bass, with keyboards adding harmonic richness and occasionally collaborator Steven Lind. The tempi are languid, the lyrics lovelorn, the harmonies straight out of the vintage jukebox in that kitschy diner in the gentrified part of town. We may be at the end of history, but there are a lot of leftovers to choose from.
Flegel presents us with the skeletons of songs, mid-20th century American music stripped to its essence and presented how it might have been presented when Flegel’s parents were little, the great American songbook filtered through an imagined past. Flegel displays serious songwriting chops, taking elements so familiar you swear you’ve heard these songs before, but putting them together in startling ways. Chord progressions taken from an oldies station melded to girl group vocals. Swinging basslines married to cowboy guitar and shoegaze bittersweetness. It is the hauntology of the dissatisfied. Anemoia, if you want to be pretentious about it. And you do. Because Diamond Jubilee would fall apart if Flegal wasn’t so serious about it.
The facile thing I’ve read many music-writers do is liken Diamond Jubilee to a radio station, and I see the appeal of this description. Songs blend into each other, abruptly end, or just sort of become the next one with no jarring sense of transition, a very deft trick of production belying the album’s ramshackle do-it-yourself feel. The occasional instrumental helps fill the gaps—the disco-fied “Gayblevision,” funky “Olive Drab,” Gallic “Le Machiniste Fantome.” There has also been much written about Flegel’s guitar playing, sentiments I agree with. Whether it’s C&W-tinged twang (“Demon Bitch”), 1950s balladeering with that delicious slapback echo (“To Heal This Broken Heart”), moody and minor-key bass-led workouts (“Dracula”), sunny pentatonic fills (“All I Want Is You”), or searing, oversaturated lead lines (“Glitz”), Flegel is no shredder but possesses the even rarer talent of a delicate touch and exacting emotion from his axe. A David Gilmour for the Zoomers. “Dreams of You,” with its bouncing bass and loping drum groove, could be a lost song from the Sgt. Pepper-era Beatles. Standout track “Flesh and Blood” is the closest Diamond Jubilee gets to an honest-to-goodness modern pop song, driving bass and ethereal chords over a motorik beat. Throughout, Flegel’s guitars provide the melody, the harmonic underpinning, and even when keys are present, gorgeous swaths of chords. They slide, they spin, they cascade down the mountain like a waterfall in the sun.
There’s a lot to digest in Diamond Jubilee. Do I think this is the greatest music ever recorded? No. Do I think it’s being kind of overrated? Yes. Do I think it will define an entire generation? Maybe. I don’t know. This isn’t my generation, it isn’t my music, and it isn’t my subculture. In these insane times, one can never discount the fact that this rapturous response might be because Cindy Lee is Patrick Flegel in drag. Identity trumps all in the 21st century, and who would dare criticize the stunning and brave? I don’t think so. Others think the reception is more cynical, a phenomenon of music sites formerly known for breaking new talent trying to jump on the bandwagon after missing the boat on Flegel’s previous outings in Women and as Cindy Lee. This is more plausible. But Flegel isn’t an outsider, and Women and Cindy Lee were highly regarded in underground circles over the past decade. Whatever the reason, I think Diamond Jubilee is being highly overrated, but it’s probably because I’m about fifteen years older than the target audience. That said, I appreciate Flegel’s artistry. If musicians younger than me are going back to the well for their inspiration, it’s great to hear them do it like this.
If you’re expecting to rock out or get any visceral thrills, you will be disappointed. If you go into Diamond Jubilee with the mindset that you want your music to caress your hair as you relax on your love’s shoulder during a cross-state bus trip out west, Diamond Jubilee fits the bill. This is definitely driving music, but really, really cool driving music. It’s romantic. It’s emotional. It’s familiar. And it just sounds nice. Sure, at 32 tracks it can get kind of samey—how often are we going to hear that Eisenhower-era “1-5-1-3-5-1” arpeggio?—but I’m just a sucker for that chunky tube-amp sound, dense presentation, and wistful sense of longing. “I want music to make me feel good,” Flegel told Gimmie Gimmie Gimmie in 2020. Well, Cindy: mission accomplished. Such a hyped-up record, such a manufactured cultural “moment,” should be the sort of thing I instinctually dislike, but after listening a few times I still find myself thinking about the sounds, the voices, the overall vibe. Yeah, this is one of those “style over substance” things. Luckily, there actually is a lot of steak here amidst the sizzle.
Good review
'Interesting' production and mixing; I'd call it unconventional, but is there any such thing as convention in music these daze? Drums are what would normally be called...bad.
Judged on its own merits this one rates a hard pass from me.
Still, in music (and I suppose in art generally) good things can eventually emerge from novelty for its own sake. Maybe it will be so in this case.