Cindy Lee – Diamond Jubilee

Psychedelic Pop | Lo-fi Indie

91%

 

Back in 2009 some prankster uploaded an album online which he claimed was by The Beatles. The story goes that he found himself transported to a parallel dimension, one in which the band had never broken up and were still releasing music together, and just happened to have the good sense to bring a tape of one of these new records back home with him as proof. In reality the project was just a bunch of remixes of the fab four’s solo work that had been spliced together – but why let the truth get in the way of a good story?

Something about this curious anecdote has always stuck with me, the idea managing to toy with my imagination in a number of ways. We all love an interesting “what if?” conundrum; bands staying together, artists not dying young, collaborations between musicians who never got to meet. Likewise I think we all have some pieces of half forgotten media that play on our minds. A film you swear you watched as a kid that no one else seems to have seen, a tune that keeps popping into your head that you just can’t seem to place. 

Diamond Jubilee doesn’t strain credulity by claiming to be a record from an alternate dimension. Its greatest strength however is that it sure as hell sounds like it is. Barely a minute of its sprawling 2 hour run time goes by without sounding like a warped memory of every 60s pop song I’ve ever heard all at once. A lengthy jam between The Beach Boys, The Supremes and The Velvet Underground that got lost to time. A record collection of the biggest singles of the late 50s to early 70s, where all the songs are somehow bleeding into each other like colours running on a tie dye shirt. Even the way you listen to it adds to the mystique. It’s not on streaming services, just on YouTube as one long video, which adds to the sensation of it being some mysterious demo or bootleg that somebody found and uploaded. 

Bright sun-kissed melodies and soulful grooves amble along through an indistinct astral haze, following a fittingly dreamlike logic. There’s little structure to the record, one idea shifting into the next, and yet all of it at a consistently high bar of quality in spite of the long run time. It feels unproductive even conceiving of it in terms of individual tracks, rather just one long dream that you drift in and out of, however that’s not to say it doesn’t have its standout moments.

‘Glitz’ rides high on a fuzzy guitar tone and glam rock rhythm that recalls T. Rex’s ‘Hot Love’, before somehow arriving into a world of solemn folk and ominous tolling bells. ‘Olive Drab’ pairs a killer bass groove with sharp stabs of strings, ‘Deepest Blue’ weaves a gorgeous reverb-heavy waltz, while the drum fills on ‘Golden Microphone’ scream classic Motown. ‘GAYBLEVISION’ dabbles in funky electronics, the pensive country pop feel of ‘Demon Bitch’ reminds me a little of ‘Wichita Lineman’, while ‘Flesh And Blood’ feels like a lost progenitor of The War On Drugs and Arcade Fire. The fittingly named ‘Always Dreaming’ is probably the closest thing Diamond Jubilee has to a single. Constantly flitting between shimmering synths, fun grooves, fuzzy guitar, bittersweet jaunty folk, and haunting harmonies on a whim, it’s a great microcosm of the whole project.

There are thousands of releases that draw influence from this era of music and seek to appeal to a sense of nostalgia. The secret ingredient that sets this one apart is in how it elects to distort the familiar. The lo-fi production leaving gaps and rough edges in something otherwise polished, sounding like a corrupted master tape or warped vinyl that’s been left forgotten for decades. Patrick Flegel’s indistinct androgenous vocal delivery echoing a melody half remembered. Moments of discordance that suggest the songs are unravelling even as you’re listening to them, as they don’t belong in this version of reality. Think Marty McFly struggling to play ‘Earth Angel’ as he begins to fade away from existence in Back to the Future. In a way I’m also reminded of save room music from horror games – it’s calming, peaceful, soothing, yet still a little uncanny. It’s not just music drifting from a random jukebox, but a jukebox in a ghost town’s deserted diner. 

Your enjoyment of Diamond Jubilee will depend on how much you buy into it. To return to the horror analogy, The Blair Witch Project is not that scary in of itself. The film’s legacy as one of the most terrifying ever made is owed to the fact that they committed to the bit: that everything onscreen really happened. It was promoted as a documentary, with fake missing persons posters for the actors shared online, and the rest was history. Watching the film now, without all that groundwork setting your expectations, doesn’t have quite the same effect. There’s a surprising amount of great music on Diamond Jubilee, but without a doubt this is a project that feeds off of being mythologised. Opening your mind up to the idea of music from another world makes our own all the more interesting. There’s no other record in 2024 that has fuelled my imagination the way this has, and in that respect I can’t recommend it enough.