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The retro artist embodies music discovery within the age earlier than the algorithm
The retro-pop artist Cindy Lee would not sit for interviews, use social media and rejects the streaming period’s calls for on unbiased artists.
Picture by Meaghan Garvey/Illustration by Jackie Lay/NPR
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Picture by Meaghan Garvey/Illustration by Jackie Lay/NPR
The retro-pop artist Cindy Lee would not sit for interviews, use social media and rejects the streaming period’s calls for on unbiased artists.
Picture by Meaghan Garvey/Illustration by Jackie Lay/NPR
It is a glad indie parable for 2024, the way in which the headlines inform it: a hard-working veteran of the late 2000s underground self-releases, with no promotion, their 32-track magnum opus through sketchy obtain hyperlink on a GeoCities web site designed like that of the Heaven’s Gate cult circa 1997. You will not discover that album, Diamond Jubilee, in your streaming platform of favor until it occurs 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 area, connected to it the best rating the evaluate website has doled out for a brand new launch in 4 years. In a flash, the title on all people’s lips was Cindy Lee, the glamorous stage persona of Canadian musician Patrick Flegel, whose post-punk band, Ladies, burned scorching and quick for just a few years earlier than disbanding in 2010.
Flegel doesn’t use social media, not sits for interviews and releases data on small labels or alone, opting out of the streaming period’s advertising and marketing and distribution paradigm nearly completely. “The place I am at proper now, I really feel like goin’ rogue,” Flegel stated final yr, encouraging artists to take their music off of Spotify, the place they’re “begging for a penny a play.” (There’s an choice to donate a prompt 30 Canadian {dollars} beside the free album obtain hyperlink on their web site.) “If I can swing it alone,” they continued, “I might a lot fairly wager on myself and have complete management.” Inside days of Pitchfork‘s evaluate, Cindy Lee’s 27-date spring tour had bought out nonetheless. Whether or not that is a internet good is tough to say; the day after Lee’s present at Milwaukee’s Cactus Membership on Could 3, it was introduced that the remaining 12 dates can be canceled for private causes. In any case, the story was the stuff that indie desires had been fabricated from 20 years in the past. However issues are very completely different now, which is to say, a lot worse, at the least in the event you’re an unbiased musician and never, say, Spotify’s CEO Daniel Ek, for whom Flegel has some selection phrases in the event you scroll down on their web site. (“THE CEO OF SPOTIFY IS A THIEF AND A WAR PIG.”)
To extol the classic charms of Diamond Jubilee‘s presentation is simple; pinning down the report’s timeless sound, much less so. Those that’ve heard the noisy anguish of a lot of Flegel’s previous work may marvel at its lightness, what you would name straightforward listening. Like many others, I got here to the music of Cindy Lee in February 2020, when their haunted-sounding fifth album, What’s Tonight To Eternity, set a wonderfully bleak tone for the approaching yr. Flegel’s been engaged on Diamond Jubilee since at the least that yr, once they referenced the work-in-progress as a feel-good counter to their earlier data’ “doom and gloom and taboo.” You may really feel the years of effort in its deceptively breezy record-collector rock, formidable and accessible without delay.
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Just like the midcentury woman teams on the middle of the moodboard, Cindy Lee’s songs are about love — having misplaced it, most of all. Lee is lonesome, Lee is blue, Lee is using the Greyhound to the Canadian border with nothing however their reminiscences. Relying the place you come from, you may comply with these wistful melodies all the way in which again to The Ronettes and The Righteous Brothers, stopping alongside the way in which at Motown soul or Velvet Underground fuzz or the cool camp of a band in a Russ Meyer flick. Or possibly you had been bumming across the weblog scene 15 years in the past, when a bumper crop of bands (Ladies amongst them) had been distorting retro pop sounds, as if all of the younger, city millennials had rewatched Twin Peaks without delay. These days I discover myself returning to this period of blog-centric music discovery with a nostalgic fondness that must be reserved for one’s past love — oh, to be a music lover within the age earlier than the algorithm!
Cindy Lee performs these songs as a down-‘n-out diva: black beehive wig, gold sequined gown, white New Steadiness sneakers, as if at any second they could determine to hit the bricks. I might half-expected to see them slumped exterior the Cactus Membership, chain-smoking morosely within the method of their cartoon likeness on Diamond Jubilee‘s cowl. The present was billed for 10 p.m., although the openers, Freak Warmth Waves, hit the small stage near 11 to a packed however well mannered room of punks on dates and nerds out previous their bedtime. Like Lee, the Canadian duo sound chiller than it used to, the band’s post-punk angst cooled to a trip-hop simmer with vocals from Steven Lind that float out in a sleazy, time-stretched purr. Maybe you acknowledge that title, the one different in addition to Flegel’s on Diamond Jubilee‘s credit. (Flegel wrote and performed every of the report’s instrumental elements, recorded on digital 8-track, however for Lind’s occasional contribution — primarily synths that arpeggiate and swirl like a stoner’s iTunes visualizer circa 2009.) There was no introduction as Lee emerged onstage to accompany the Freaks on the band’s 2023 monitor “In a Second Divine” with eyes low and temper obscure. I could not learn the expression written on their stoic face: too extreme to be known as shy, however deeper than disinterest. Pleased? Properly, no.
Then the whole lot disappeared however Cindy Lee and their guitar, a cherry Telecaster which they held with out a strap and brandished like a weapon. I’ve by no means seen a residing particular person play guitar like they do, with an informal mastery I might imagined was reserved for individuals who’ve made offers with the satan. Punctuating dreamy melodies with suggestions exclamations, the music appeared to return from way back and much away, with a tone so sharp it damage. Lee performed over an instrumental backing monitor, staring previous the group out towards some thriller horizon. At occasions they put aside the Telly to sing in plucky falsetto: “Deepest darkness, deepest blue…” (Writers have likened the vibe of the vocal efficiency to that of Blue Velvet‘s Roy Orbison scene, although for me, it is James’ shrill and earnest woman group in Twin Peaks that springs to thoughts.) Right here and there, a track was adopted by a muffled “thanks” or the curl of ruby lips within the suggestion of a smile. The 45-minute set closed with a trio of songs older than Diamond Jubilee, final of all an instrumental (2020’s “Cat o’ 9 Tails III”) in whose wake the room was held instantly of surprised silence. Then the cheers erupted, and Cindy Lee was gone.
I actually am nowhere close to as principled as Flegel, nor as savvy as I as soon as was in my younger DIY days. In a useless try to burn Diamond Jubilee on CD, I rapidly realized my fancy laptop computer did not have the means, which made me really feel ashamed. Was I actually so content material to let a tech firm define the parameters of my entry to the issues that make me glad to be alive? (Fingers crossed that while you learn this, the exterior CD burner I ordered could have arrived.) I’ve grown uncomfortably accustomed to that form of impotence, the sense that for the fashionable period’s supposedly boundless selections, much less is feasible than earlier than. How rapidly we neglect that we’ve different choices, that the tech trade’s scalability obsession needn’t be our personal. When music critics write of the success of Diamond Jubilee, they have a good time a victory towards their very own perceived irrelevance, and of their newfound hope they have an inclination to make it bizarre, flattering themselves with questions like, “Is Cindy Lee the way forward for music?”
To place it bluntly: no, nor ought to they need to be. I do not anticipate Diamond Jubilee to be a harbinger of something. What Lee represents so thrillingly is nothing however themself — a lot in order that when Freak Warmth Waves introduced on Instagram that the rest of the tour had been canceled “for causes past our management,” I felt weirdly relieved. In an period dominated by fan service, you would nearly neglect that it is private. Intestine intuition, plus a message on their web site posted earlier than the insanity (“THIS WILL BE CINDY’S LAST AMERICAN TOUR”), offers me the sensation that I’ll have witnessed the last-ever Cindy Lee present. What we’re left with is the music, which is not a glimpse on the future however a reminder of one thing we already knew — artwork is for making nonetheless we select.
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