Cindy Lee - Diamond Jubilee 3LP

I gotta admit that I’ve got a fair bit of scepticism for what feel like flash-in-the-pan albums, and although I’ve enjoyed hearing bits of Cindy Lee’s discography here and there over the years, the idea of eking out time to listen to something on a Geocities website doesn’t really do it for me.

But I can see why people are hyped by this. The lofi murkiness and mystery of Cindy Lee’s previous records is still more than present here where tight songs, hooky melodies, and spurts of guitar abound. Like a a DIY Brian Wilson trying their best to nail the pop sentimentality of The Shangri-Las or Roy Orbison with slight forays into surf, psych, and kraut using a tape machine and a reverb unit in a manner that would make it fit to feature in the Roadhouse scenes of the Twin Peaks reboot. This is good, well made, and dare I say, polite music.

My hunch is that a lot of the fervour around it emerges from a particular nostalgia for a moment in the mid to late aughts when Pitchfork reigned as supreme taste maker. I don’t mean that in a negative way necessarily, but to say that the fervour around Diamond Jubilee doesn’t seem to me to speak to a contemporary time or place in music (except for the fact that the length of it almost mirrors the endless and needless dumping of music onto streaming platforms), but nods to a bygone era when things were probably better; a time when independent acts could exist with a level of mystery and could ambitiously dip freely into genre experimentation while still garnering a degree of above-ground recognition. Maybe the old twenty-year cycle cliche is proving true and hypnogogic pop/chillwave is coming back into vogue? Does that make this is meta-hypnagogic?
-Mitch