by Devin Birse (@devvvvi.b)
Shimmering like a mirrored ballroom Diamond Jubilee is a record of tasteful excess. Across its two-hour runtime, the album never seems to ache for the common descriptors of work of its length. This is not an album that is epic in scope or full of aching ten-minute-plus tracks, but rather a precisely and perfectly executed collection of hauntingly brilliant guitar pop.
It’s been clear since their days as vocalist and guitarist of Calgary cult legends Women that Pat Flegel has always had a keen eye for the more haunting qualities of sixties pop. The way that the wall of voices on “Be My Baby” resembles a siren call to come crashing against the shore, or how despite its rousing chorus “Superstars” true heart is in those verses where the aching melancholy in Karen Carpenter's voice is truly exposed. Cindy Lee as a persona has always carried spectral quality, as if Flegel was resurrecting the ghosts of sixties girl groups past and channelling them through a husky yet tender falsetto and glitteringly sharp guitar. Where other albums under Cindy Lee have explored harsh synth soundscapes and no-wave angularities, Diamond Jubilee is as pure of a pop record as any of those sixty’s greats. Complete with haunting brill-building production, gorgeous choruses, and barely any songs that break the five-minute mark.
While these tracks are more accessible than Cindy’s previous work, they still carry new sounds and peculiarities. A subtle disco swagger underlies much of the album's first half, a sudden switch into a disco beat transforms opener “Diamond Jubilee” from a tense spindly guitar ballad into a confident groove. Elsewhere on “Olive Drab” a suitably seventies bass line gifts violin-like guitar strokes a cinematic strut. That’s not to say this is an album entirely of confidence, like previous Cindy Lee projects, a deep melancholy belies most of these songs. Yet where on an album like From Tonight to Eternity these moments might have been gifted a Lynchian creepiness, here they instead have a warming gentleness.
Take the phenomenal “All I Want is You” where the backing vocals of Steve Lind lend a sense of community in isolation, the tracks suddenly burst into one of Flegel’s sublimely expressive and haunting solos before reunifying into that haunting chorus that feels like a sonic tap on the shoulder, Felgel and Lind’s voices coming together to sway the listener like a carer’s hands on a weeping child. This gentleness is what marks out Diamond Jubilee among the rest of the Cindy Lee catalogue, there is a sense of real tenderness and empathy to her ballads but never a desire to fully linger in melancholy. On “Government Cheque,” a weeping build-up suddenly swings into a rousing burst of finger snaps and spider-like guitar lines. Much of the surrounding material on Cindy Lee’s website suggests this is the final release of the project and if that’s so there's a sense that Flegel doesn’t want to end on pure misery, rather Diamond Jubilee appears a celebration of what Cindy Lee as a project is capable of.
When read as a swansong, Diamond Jubilee takes on a shimmering new quality. Flegel’s classically heartbroken lyrics always seemed to fit in an interzone between genuine emotion and hypnagogic recreation of pop misery but instead offer a genuine goodbye to an identity. The album cover even seems to reflect this, Cindy Lee now rendered separate from the real world, a lost comic figure drawn from broken dreams projected over a postcard of a Canada that no longer exists. It’s a perfect summary of Cindy Lee’s music, imagined pop songs for an era long past, sung by a singer who was never really there. There's also a modernity to the music of Diamond Jubilee, the way Flegel effortlessly flickers from a glam rock stomp on the blistering “Glitz” to the sombre sixties croon of “Baby Blue” rather than exploring merely the niches of girl group pop and its potential for hauntings
Diamond Jubilee instead reads as an examination of pop history. Digging deep into the crevices of the forgotten tappers and hip swayers of decades past and exposing the subtle elements of the weird and eerie that exist underneath. It's what justifies the album's colossal two-hour length, that, and the raw quality of the music. Flegel has always been at heart an artist concerned with pop, it was the pop edge they brought to Women's experimental post-punk menace that made Public Strain a cult classic. It was the interplay of slicing synthesizers with slowed-down sixties melancholy that left What's Tonight To Eternity so heartbreaking. Here it’s something simpler, it's the perfect fusion of Flegel's specificity as an artist, their tear-draining falsetto, their wonderfully precise yet never overstated spindly guitar stylings, with a genuine love of pop to create a piece of work that’s utterly spellbinding in its gorgeous complexity and immediate enjoyability.
It is in part heartbreaking to reckon with the notion of this being the final Cindy Lee album. To no longer be able to look forward to another potential drop from the project and spend a month diving into another goody bag of heartfelt haunting sonic bliss, but if this is how it ends, I don’t think anyone could ask for more. Diamond Jubilee feels like a goodbye, but not a hug outside a train station, rather one grand going away disco. The lo-fi production giving the enclosed warmth of velvet lined seats, the drums a bustling dance floor, those glittering guitars one grand swaying disco ball, and at the front on stage is Cindy Lee singing their heart out to sway us off gently into the night one final time. By the time it all ends with “24/7 Heaven,” there aren’t even any vocals, just an eye watering combination of synths with Flegel’s best guitar work in years. It's like Cindy Lee has already left the stage, and instead, Flegel is giving us one last moment to reflect, to smile and cry, before the curtains are drawn and we truly have to say goodbye.