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IVH: Cindy Lee / Diamond Jubilee [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-06-26
Tonight’s selections from Cindy Lee’s magnum opus, 2024’s Diamond Jubilee.
Imagine yourself in a post-apocalyptic world, cowering in an underground bunker. As you fiddle with the knobs of your radio, you finally manage to tune into the only station available. It sounds like ‘50s or ‘60s pop, but it feels different. Perhaps it's your lousy radio, but it almost sounds like the radioactivity from the atmosphere has seeped into the music itself. This is the best description I can give for the feeling that Cindy Lee’s latest album, Diamond Jubilee, evokes. Cindy Lee is Pat Flegal’s drag alter ego, and they began their music career as a part of the Calgary-based underground psychedelic rock outfit, Women. The band released several great songs, including the 2010 album Public Strain, a much-loved classic in noise-rock and post-punk circles in the last decade. However, the same year this album was released, an infamous on-stage fight led to the cancellation of the rest of their tour, and the band fractured. A few years later hopes of the band reuniting were crushed by the tragic passing of their guitarist, Chris Reimer. Flegal then struck out on their own under a few different names, but most notably as Cindy Lee, releasing 7 albums in the past 12 years, none of which have drawn such a positive reaction as Diamond Jubilee has garnered over the last few months. Upon listening you can hear why. Diamond Jubilee is a time capsule from an alternate reality, with Flegal crafting a lo-fi, retro-surrealist, hypnagogic pop experience. The album sounds as if a ghost with a liking for post-punk, possessed a number of different genres giving us haunting, eerie snippets of ’50s doo-wop, ’60s girl groups, psychedelic pop and lo-fi indie to name a few. There are vibes of Brian Wilson-esque sunshine pop production, while also sounding at times like outtakes from a Velvet Underground project. The vocal performances are sparse yet ghostly, performed for the majority in Flegel’s androgynous falsetto. Flegel’s technical ability is also clear on this record, with incredible guitar chops on display. The lo-fi quality which has soured a few of Cindy Lee’s other albums, is an asset here. Flegal has managed to write songs which cut through the warm fuzz of mayhem, created by the blemishes, “wrong” notes, and sonic bleed. — The Cambridge Student
Diamond Jubilee
The 32-track magnum opus from the glamorous alter-ego of Canadian musician Patrick Flegel hit the scene like some old movie where a mysterious drifter shows up with their guitar to breathe new life into a sleepy town. Presented as a two-hour listening gauntlet with no breaks between tracks—or as a sketchy download link on a GeoCities website that channeled Heaven’s Gate—Diamond Jubilee seemed to float in from another place and time. You might follow its wistful melodies all the way back to the Ronettes and the Righteous Brothers, stopping along the way at Motown soul or Velvet Underground fuzz or the cool camp of a band in a Russ Meyer flick, or to the late aughts blog scene, when indie acts were distorting retro pop sounds as if the young, urban millennials had all rewatched Twin Peaks at once. Like the girl groups at the center of their moodboard, Cindy Lee’s songs are about love—having lost it, most of all. She is lonesome, she is blue, she is riding the Greyhound to the Canadian border with nothing but her memories; she is wailing on her cherry-red guitar with the kind of casual mastery generally reserved for those who’ve made deals with the devil. No one could have predicted that this sprawling, out-of-time record, self-released by an artist opting out of the streaming era’s marketing and distribution paradigm almost entirely, would become the “feel-good indie rock story of the year,” according to the headlines on music publications celebrating a rare victory against their own perceived irrelevance. It’s hard to say whether the sentiment was shared at all by Flegel, who announced onstage at one of the subsequently sold-out shows, “I feel like a caged fucking animal,” before canceling the tour completely. In an era dominated by fan service, you could almost forget that it's personal, or that the scalability obsession of the tech industry masquerading as the music industry needn't be our own. If all of Cindy Lee that we are left with is the music, echoing like a memory from another life, maybe that’s the way it ought to be. — Pitchfork
Kingdom Come
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There is an inescapable feeling of duality to the record, in that it feels tender yet raw, immersive yet fractured, varied yet coherent. Given that Cindy Lee is a drag persona of Flegel, it’s not too much of a stretch to suggest that they are someone who is in a prime position to inherently understand the psychology, nuances and expressive capabilities of having, and exploring, dual identities and personalities. While there is not a stark night and day difference between the two parts of the album, there is a shift in shade, a subtle tweaking that seems to unlock another side to Cindy Lee. Tracks like “Gayblevision” feel like moving from the bedroom to the nightclub, as synths shimmer and an almost 1980s darkwave sheen moves in, completely shifting the tone, pace and punch of the album. These dualities often exist within single songs too. “What’s It Going To Take” feels like it owes as much to the bucolic and progressive sounds of the Canterbury Scene, as it does to avant-funk and bedroom pop. The vocals – as is generally the case throughout the record – are sparse, ethereal and minimal, often feeling more like a ghostly presence that swings by from time to time than a constant narrator. But ultimately, where Cindy Lee thrives is not necessarily existing in one particular place or genre – or part of the album – but existing in the in-between, operating in blurred lines, misty shadows and the cracks. There is an inherently dreamy, almost Lynchian quality to this record that allows for a deeply and richly immersive listen that seems to float endlessly between varied places while losing little of its flow. Which is all the more impressive to achieve over a whopping 32 tracks. While tonally, structurally and thematically it’s vastly different, there is something of a similar feeling and result here to The Magnetic Fields’ classic 69 Love Songs. Both manage the incredibly difficult feat of feeling vast and scattered across bountiful tracks, yet also complete, connected and the embodiment of a songwriter capable of tapping into a broad range of music seemingly on a whim. — Uncut
Dracula
By the time that Pitchfork awarded Diamond Jubilee its highest score in four years last week, something had … happened. One couldn’t help but note the improbability of this album’s rapid ascent in the midst of rollouts for two of the year’s most massive pop juggernauts, one of which has already dominated popular discourse (Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter) and one that will surely be escapable once it drops on Friday (Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department). To be clear: Cindy Lee has not and will not garner even a tiny fraction of the dialogue afforded those blockbusters. But it still feels like a glitch in the matrix, the kind of record that is not supposed to be here but is definitely here nevertheless. The sort of upstart success that was presumed to be impossible without TikTok or some other social-media chicanery. Diamond Jubilee might be a great album, but it’s an even better story. [...] The paradox of writing about Diamond Jubilee is that it threatens to undermine the album’s charm. Flegel has already expressed misgivings about engaging their fans in the music press. No matter the protestations of hype-averse skeptics, Flegel did not actively court indie fame before the album’s release. “If you want to sell units sometimes you have to do stuff,” Flegel told Gimme Zine in 2020, when they were just starting to conceive Diamond Jubilee. “I got a publicist for the last record, but you watch the press and publicist (who’s a friend of mine) people stumbling around queer… branding you… the whole thing makes me squirm.” [...] Diamond Jubilee is composed of material stockpiled during the pandemic-era lockdown, though the final result sounds like a carefully plotted concept record documenting the career of a late, great (and imaginary) pop group. I burned the songs onto two CD-Rs, and listening to Diamond Jubilee this way enhances the feeling of listening to a greatest hits collection of made-up “greatest hits.” The first disc is very good but somewhat less refined, with nods to the dulcet third VU record (“Wild One”), grindhouse Eurotrash horror soundtracks (“Le Machiniste Fantome”), and The Pod era Ween (“Demon Bitch”). The second disc, meanwhile, is a near-masterpiece, affecting a more consistent psych-soul sound that moves from sinister (“Stone Faces”) to delirious (“Dracula”) to heartbroken (“If You Hear Me Crying”) to haunted (“Durham City Limit”). — Uproxx
Glitz
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It's a happy indie parable for 2024, the way the headlines tell it: a hard-working veteran of the late 2000s underground self-releases, with no promotion, their 32-track magnum opus via sketchy download link on a GeoCities website designed like that of the Heaven's Gate cult circa 1997. You won't find that album, Diamond Jubilee, on your streaming platform of favor unless it happens to be YouTube, which presents the double album as a two-hour listening gauntlet with no breaks between tracks. Cue the Pitchfork rave from deep out of left field, attached to it the highest score the review site has doled out for a new release in four years. In a flash, the name on everybody's lips was Cindy Lee, the glamorous stage persona of Canadian musician Patrick Flegel, whose post-punk band, Women, burned hot and fast for a few years before disbanding in 2010. Flegel does not use social media, no longer sits for interviews and releases records on small labels or alone, opting out of the streaming era's marketing and distribution paradigm almost entirely. "Where I'm at right now, I feel like goin' rogue," Flegel said last year, encouraging artists to take their music off of Spotify, where they're "begging for a penny a play." (There's an option to donate a suggested 30 Canadian dollars beside the free album download link on their website.) "If I can swing it on my own," they continued, "I'd much rather bet on myself and have total control." Within days of Pitchfork's review, Cindy Lee's 27-date spring tour had sold out nonetheless. Whether that's a net good is hard to say; the day after Lee's show at Milwaukee's Cactus Club on May 3, it was announced that the remaining 12 dates would be canceled for personal reasons. In any case, the story was the stuff that indie dreams were made of 20 years ago. — NPR
Dreams of You
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. — Post-Trash
All I Want Is You
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WHO’S TALKING TO WHO?
Jimmy Kimmel: Emma Stone, Heidi Klum, Dolores Huerta, guest host Diego Luna
Jimmy Fallon: Jeremy Allen White
Seth Meyers: Mariska Hargitay, Jacob Soboroff, Mike Drucker
After Midnight: Lennon Parham, Tim Baltz, Chris Fleming (R 4/30/25)
Watch What Happens Live: Charlize Theron, Henry Golding
[END]
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