Cindy Lee - Diamond Jubilee
The sound of decay from the ears of saprotrophs
Looking back sixty years, Cindy Lee’s Diamond Jubilee is the soundtrack to a documentary that doesn’t exist — one about obscure pop groups and one-hit wonders, about the veneer of happiness and wealth in the post-war boom stretching thinner and thinner, until it erupted into a countercultural howl. One that not many people saw, and even fewer heard the soundtrack for, and now is only known because some classic hip hop or EDM album sampled it for their banger 2nd single.
The influences are broad, but immediately recognizable. Girl groups and vocal pop, country/western, the psychedelic end of soul, sunshine pop, surf, some British Invasion, flashes of spaghetti western, and just enough Velvet Underground to keep the rest at arms’ length. The production is near-flawlessly evocative of not just 60s pop, but of poorly archived 60s pop, compiled on cheap vinyl, remastered on cheaper CDs. The performances are rhythmically loose, like demos or live cuts or second-hand radio performances. Everything is either dulled into a dark, warm blur, or sharpened and brightened into a searing, screaming firework.
It’s when the group harness that sound, that white-hot knife cutting through analog artifacts and dated media, that the album transcends. The ghosts of pacified hot rodders and housewives-in-training, limply mis-remembering a dance craze, before their sexual repression and violent conservatism irradiate their suburban dream and annihilate the rest of the 20th century. It’s the sound of the lost who refuse to check the map. It’s the sound of decay from the ears of saprotrophs.
Sometimes, the group themselves get lost in the sauce of this sound. The performances are too loose, or are loose in the same way, and the illusion breaks. Sometimes the vocals don’t quite straddle the line between haunting ephemera and blurred nondescription, or the melody underneath all the echo languishes without motion. Once or twice the digital age appears, an awful drum machine or a synthetic bass or a uniquely digital kind of distortion, and spoils the banality of what comes after the end of the world. And even listening to each disc separately, there are parts where each loses momentum, putting multiple slow, novocained Brill Builders in a row.
But momentum might be the wrong vantage point for this release. It does have that Various Artists compilation vibe, where tracks are put in some purposeful order, just not one for coherence of the listening experience. This is a record to be picked through, two or three or five at a time, favorites chosen and added to mixtapes and burned CDs and iPods and playlists. It’s not a revival piece or a retro novelty, but an affecting simulacrum, a lovingly crafted false memory implanted on a wiki of lost media.