on 3xLPs

When Patrick Flegel started making solo music following the death of a bandmate and subsequent disbandment of Women in 2012, Flegel brought forward their drag persona Cindy Lee to make experimental music that merged abrasive, damaged, and deteriorated sounds with both pining and posturing style influences like classic girl groups, glam, '50s tragi-pop, psychedelic and noise rock, and more. With Cindy Lee's fifth album, Diamond Jubilee, only brief traces of some of the gloomier aspects of the project surface on a collection intended to counter darker and noisier prior material, such as 2020’s What's Tonight to Eternity. Recorded over the next several years, mostly alone, when Diamond Jubilee finally appeared with little self-promotion in March 2024, it was with 32 tracks, an over-two-hour playing time, and available only as a download exclusively from Cindy Lee's rudimentary GeoCities website. Nevertheless, the album took on a life of its own thanks in part to an enthusiastic reception from critics and fans who made the effort early on to secure a download (that felt like it could've been a virus). But this emergence never would have happened if not for the fact that Diamond Jubilee plays out like an escape fantasy, carrying listeners along on haunted melodies, sweetly yearning emotions, frequent multi-tracked and multi-octave vocals, and '50s pop influences, with the occasional impulsive synth pop ("GAYBLEVISION"), glam rock ("Glitz"), unearthly funk (the disco-y "Olive Drab" -- "Darling of the Diskoteque" is entirely ‘50s-suffused), or classic soul diversion ("Always Dreaming," "Stone Faces," the doo wop-possessed "What's It Going to Take") that sputters and disappears as soon as any of Cindy Lee’s mid-century pop specters rematerialize. For a guiding principle, look no further than the opening lines, "In the diamond’s eye/Shining down on me/A single memory/And it’s of you" ("Diamond Jubilee"). The album was recorded on digital eight-track, with all wide-ranging vocals and harmonies provided by Flegel/Lee; the only other contributor here (apart from mastering engineer Joshua Stevenson) was Steven Lind, who mixed the record, co-wrote "Baby Blue," and contributed various instrumental performances to around a third of the tracks. In the end, they created a sprawling epic whose uncanny, time-worn textures sound less like a vinyl alley-find and more like a cassette discovered in the cabin of a great-uncle's shipwrecked houseboat. It’s a beautiful, fragile, immersive, and above all, dreamlike set that easily rewards the investment in its length.