This might be the best radio station you've ever come across. Unless it's multiple stations talking to each other, in and out of range. The sounds arrive in strange combinations. nothing is exactly as you remember. Did this classic rock band really have a synth player and why did they choose a patch that sounds like a mosquito buzzing through a cheap distortion pedal? And those eerie harmonies swirling around the edges of this last dance ballad by some 1960s girl group whose name ends in -elles or -ettes. Did they hire some dejected ghosts hanging around the studio as backup singers? Or do these fragments of other songs, other signals, surface like distant searchlights over a hill and then disappear once more?
Or maybe this is it Diamond Jubilee, Cindy Lee's sprawling and spectacular new album: two hours, 32 songs, each a misty transmission from a rock 'n' roll underworld with its own imaginary canon of beloved hits. Like many of Lee's previous works, its spiritual center is girl group music, limited to a single girl and reflected through a hall of mirrors. From there, it stretches to the extremes of the radio dial, and sometimes beyond: the warped classic rock of 'Glitz', the fragmented disco of 'Olive Drab', the sunburnt psychedelia of the title track, the nocturnal synth-pop of 'GAYBLEVISION .” “Darling of the Diskoteque” sounds like Tom Waits and Marc Ribot masquerading as Santo and Johnny. “Le Machiniste Fantome” as a cue from some fantastic score by Ennio Morricone in a movie about 9th century monks. But even at its most idiosyncratic, the music conveys the archetypal lust of pop. Almost every song is about a lover gone, and the dream that their loss – the lonely moonlit nights, the determination to move on, the resignation to forever haunt – can be as romantic as love itself.
Lee is the impressive alter ego of songwriter, guitarist and drag performer Patrick Flegel. In a different life, he was the frontman for Women, a brilliant and volatile Canadian post-punk band in the late 2000s. They quickly caught fire after two albums, an onstage fistfight and the unrelated sudden death of a member, but their guitarists lines, their asymmetric rhythms and surprisingly sweet melodies have remained influences on major strands of DIY rock. Flegel's old bandmates formed the Preoccupations and soon gravitated towards the crunchy sonics and propulsive grooves of new wave. If the Preoccupations found a solid middle ground between the extremes of their old band, Flegel pushed further out in both directions, donning a blue wig and Nancy Sinatra boots and releasing a series of albums as Cindy Lee that put pure pop songs together with conflicting outbursts of commentary.
