REVIEW: Cindy Lee—Diamond Jubilee (2024)

Sprawling 32-song masterwork is a haunted late-night radio show from an alternate dimension.

Under normal circumstances, if someone tried to recommend me a 2-hour triple album, my eyes would be doing triple somersaults faster that I could blink. But these are far from normal circumstances. The world appears to be staring fully into the abyss, and all rules have gone out of the window.

So what better than to sink into an album that can carry you away from the glowing existential crisis rectangle, with a sequence of pretty reverb-infused tunes, laced with strings and gentle falsetto yearning.

Patrick Flegal hinted at these kinds of songs on various other albums down the years, but they were often seemingly there to sweeten the frazzled mixture of sound collages. This 2-hour set picks on that sugary girl-group sound, and runs with it across all three albums in this set. But the way it twists and evolves over the course of the runtime gives it a flow somewhere close to a late-night radio show, where the DJ has a remit to educate the listeners on the deep cuts that got away.

So when the album takes various left turns, you’re with DJ Flegal all the way. What’s this? VHS piracy warning synth theme tune instrumental into early 70s psychedelic soul? You got it! The genius at play here is that you don’t really even need to listen. You can just have it on in the background like a radio show, and drift in and out when something catches your ear. It will take weeks, months, to fully unpack what’s going on here.

This album originally came out via a Geocities download in April last year, and most of us consumed it via a YouTube rip, waiting patiently for it to come out on a physical format. Hoping it would come out on a physical format, because that was never a given, and indeed took many months before being announced.

And then we saw the price and our jaws haven’t left the floor since. Amazon.co.uk had it up for £79. Most UK sites had it up for between £64 and £70. For an album. Now, I tediously play bargain hunter every single time an album comes out, and categorically rejected the idea of paying that much. I knew it would be available cheaper, and lo and behold good old Rarewaves had it for £48 (+ free shipping), before going out of stock the same day.

One by one, every shop, every site was out of stock. And then it transpired that various European sites had it for about £38 (e.g. Milan-based SoundOhm), so even with shipping it was a vast saving on what our lovely cuddly UK indies wanted for it. How could this be so? Either the distie responsible was ripping the indies off, or the indies were profiteering to a ridiculous degree. Either way, the huge price difference was absurd. Nobody needs to be paying up to £70 (plus shipping!) for an album, no matter how good it is. Vinyl pricing has gone fully nuts since Covid, but a lot of it is just greed. Some artists and some labels choose to price fairly. Others choose to be greedy bastards. That’s capitalism for you.

Anyway, the point is, if you love this record (and I hope you do. It’s a wondrous thing), and you want to own it, please don’t get ripped off. There are easy ways and means to get around this. I ended up buying two copies and splitting the shipping with a mate, so it worked out at £44 each—a perfectly fair price for a triple album of this quality.