Cindy Lee - Diamond Jubilee

former guitarist of Women has been putting out music under the Cindy Lee moniker for awhile now but this new double album is a huge step up imo, def my AOTY so far (and also RYM's AOTY so far lol)

gonna let this tweet do the otm description better than I can

Cindy Lee - Diamond Jubilee answers the question what if the most faded 50s girl group / post-punk band forgotten by history played a sock hop in the town from Blue Velvet & introduced the villagers to guitar tones & krautrock jams that would kill a Victorian child

— Good Willsmith (@GoodWillsmith) April 5, 2024

anyway, it's only either available on YouTube or as a free wav (lol) download on this Geocities site: http://www.geocities.ws/ccqsk/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LJi5na897Y

heavy load with remarkable quality ratio. endlessly great and hooky guitar playing. bit hard to take in at once. Always Dreaming is a standout for me.

sent my $30 CAD :)

AOTY

9.1 on P4k

I guess I'll be that guy: This album is pretty cool but I'm clearly not hearing the world-changing work everyone else seems to be hearing.

Saw Cindy Lee last night. Great show if a touch shorter than I had hoped.

Great review on p4k. "Flesh and Blood" was my fav.

is cindy lee a 'band' or still solo with a tape backing?

9.1 on P4k

Apparently their highest score for a new album in four years, since Fiona Apple.

mostly solo with tape backing with a few helpers for a couple songs

Is it good? Yes, it's very good.
But is it THAT good? Probably not.

have listened in chunks and liked a lot of it–enough to buy it from the geocities site–but haven't yet found a song better than "in a moment divine" from the freak heat waves album

also kinda frustrated that her nyc show is the same night as the neil young show i paid an arm and a leg for lol

Reminds me a hair of Bradford Cox’s Atlas Sound stuff at points?

I only listened to like 5 minutes of this album but it sounded like a mix of the garage pop stuff that was everywhere post-Black Lips exploding in popularity and that Twin Peaks TV music kind of sound…didn’t really get what was so noteworthy about it and the songs sampled didn’t really stand out either but I mean I definitely did not put in the work here.

Almost through listening to it, there are a few moments, mostly of scratchy guitar, that made me take notice, mostly i find this hard to pay attention to but nice to have on

finally digging in in full. prefer the second cd to the first by a large margin.

Completely random--I listen to new albums in their entirety two or three times a year--but this interested me enough to track it down. I've listened to the first disc three times in the car, the second disc once today. I think the first four songs are great--"Dreams of You" probably my favourite--and reminded me a bit of an over-the-top review I wrote of Psychocandy when I was just starting out in 1986. The rest of the first disc is pretty good. Based on just the one listen, I don't like the second as much, but--two-hour drive home later today--will give it another go.

Turned disc 2 up a bit and listened more attentively on the way home, and it got a little better. Moodier than disc 1-- some good late-night driving music. I don't think the album gets better than those first four songs ("Baby Blue" is pure "Just Like Honey," with an obvious nod to Badfinger), but all in all, I'd say it's worth at least 68% of whatever ink's been spilled on it.

You may know, but let the record show there was a lot of discussion of this record here:

thread to dis hyped releases that you don't get/don't like/wanna complain about

Thanks. Surprised that I seem to be alone in preferring disc 1. Something else I meant to mention: the estates of Bob Feldman, Jerry Goldstein, and Richard Gottehrer, who wrote the McCoys' (or, if you prefer, David Bowie's) "Sorrow," should sue Cindy Lee over "Baby Blue."

Yeah...how could there not be a backlash after that debut week?

Heard this today and am really enjoying it

Ctrl-F "needs an editor" hmmm...

I'm only about 20 minutes in, but so far it sounds like it starts with a few memorable songs and then deconstructs into sonically creative but meandering vibes that would make for nice background listening.

What prevents this record from being a masterpiece imo is the fact that about 30%-40% of the songs here feels half baked melody wise, with only one verse and one chorus or without a chorus at all.

Also disc 1 is better

fuck these guys for stealing the house music cindy lee's name

Pretty amazing live set - somehow gels the album experience for me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0QKjcNaNbI

lots of quality guitar shredding in that video

I'm staying pleasantly lost inside this record, and it wouldn't be as appealing as a tight and punchy set of the peaks. It reminds me of Chromatics Kill for Love, a very assured aesthetic that could be tossed off or labored over but makes you feel like you are in the passenger seat for a long drive into the night.

I've also been enjoying this, sadly their entire tour was cancelled the other day

I was thinking of Steve Albini the last time I streamed this.

Custom tracklists for this album, I just don't want to see them

It reminds me of Chromatics Kill for Love, a very assured aesthetic that could be tossed off or labored over but makes you feel like you are in the passenger seat for a long drive into the night.

― Bertold Brak (bendy), Wednesday, May 8, 2024 12:19 PM (three hours ago)

i like this

i'm partial to the first disc but that's just more my personal taste. glitz, baby blue, all i want is you, dallas, always dreaming, wild one, flesh and blood, demon bitch ... i'm naming like the entire tracklist. i do like how the sharper songwriting kinda flickers intermittently throughout the second disc but the first disc really wallops me

I guess there is no established formula for a 2-hour album made up of actual songs but it does make sense for it to stretch out somewhat in the second half

('actual songs' as opposed to dub versions, jams with Clapton, kids singing Career Opportunities etc.)

I was hoping to see Cindy during the tour but the show near me came and went and I'd forgotten haha. The new album was very good though! Reminds me of the Aislers Set a tad...

okay, this has been one of my most anticipated things recently and we're settling in for a first listen now.

first few tracks sound absolute fire but i just have to ask why the fierce independence on the distribution? not even free on bandcamp, huh? don't get me wrong, i like the ethos a lot ("digital digging") but all told it took me 90 minutes to get it together. three different unzipping apps and tediously numerous file renamings later, hey now here we are.

is it weird of me to consider that rotary connection might be a touchstone for some of the sounds here?

retrofuture melodic squelch rock ftw. disc 2 is great! gonna need more time, but yep i like it a lot.

i think this sounds like the jukebox at malcolm mclaren's sex, but in alternate timeline. definitely has that john waters/david lynch vibe and i love how lofi it is. really good, a lot to calibrate. very firm 4 mics.

queer Chris Isaak vibes

hi the more i listen to this, the better it gets. i'm kind of in alignment with the pfork review in the sense that it feels like a highlight reel and i can't pick a favorite. kinda cliche, but yeah: if there's a lead single, it's "flesh and blood." holy smokes this is fantastic. i'm enthusiastically sticking with andy's 4 mics. gonna be a _great_ summer album.

but mostly i wanted to post not to ask about the "roots+influences" of this stuff ―it's like stereolab and could probably merit its own thread just on sonics alone― but to see what you guys thought about in terms of similarities to contemporary music? you know... that queer chris isaak/dark purple sunrise after being up all night thing.

reason i ask is because even before i heard this album, a lot of the things i was having show up in my algorithms are definitely occupying the same space. a couple that really stuck out to me, especially after hearing diamond jubilee―
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzGaER-aR7I
mega bog ― "wet moss" (2013)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8t1i9G1R8t4
sepiatone ― "new world" (2001)

and then there's the entirety of the band soft location, who i can't recommend enough. also a ton of self-released west coast stuff that i don't wanna get into, but only for not wanting to divert away from this wonderful album. go listen to it!

so in a perfect world, "flesh and blood" dominates everything through late june, just for "all i want is you" to carry us into the second half of summer, triumphantly and appropriately.

More on the roots and influences tip, but I see some parallels to Magnetic Fields "69 Love Songs" in terms of the sprawling ambition, lyrical themes, and ramshackle vibe.

Listening this week stirred up memories of The Lavender Flu's Heavy Air which I liked quite a bit when I came out, but then forgot about.

it’s not really pulling from the same exact places sonically but especially the first few times streaming diamond jubilee on youtube it took me back to my first times hearing ‘oh you’re so silent jens’ … something similar about, in o. nate’s words, “the sprawling ambition and ramshackle vibe.” jens is more verbose and humorous as a lyricist, but there’s a combination of doomed romantic moroseness in the lyrics and crackly lo fi warmth in the production on diamond jubilee (disc 1 in particular) that reminds me of early jens

it's very deerhuntery imo

yeah when my boyfriend listened to it for the first time he said it made him think immediately of atlas sound

I do like the way it reminds me of old doo wop and old rock n'roll in terms of vibe than sound (although occasionally sounding like that too). The length of it all does induce a bit of zone out but its good enough to keep you coming back to it. Im on my 3rd listen of it now.

"lou reed jams with michael rother"

I also feel there are some slight parallels to fellow Calgarian Ryan Bourne's album of lo-fi bedroom psych from last year, Plant City, co-produced by Calgary uber-scenester Chad Van Gaalen, whose label also has put out Cindy Lee's former band Women.

this just sounds like something on slumberland to me

"dracula" (the old man is back again!) is a jam

I'm hearing Jefferson Airplane here & there... good stuff

Finally on Bandcamp, with physical editions (CD & LP) coming in early 2025:

https://cindylee.bandcamp.com/album/diamond-jubilee

AOTY

About £80 for the 3xLP + shipping to the UK

Happily snagged this. (Digital download, obv.)

hell yeah, double CD

This is a good one for the double CD treatment

Already a smash success in just a couple of hours even if you're talking Bandcamp sales alone -- over one thousand copies, and even if that was just solely digital that'd be $20,000, and it's obviously not just that.

Almost 90 USD for the standard black vinyl and shipping to the EU is quite a lot, what are the chances this will end up in regular record stores in 2025?

Spotify too?

Nope, not on Spotify.

shipping to the EU is quite a lot, what are the chances this will end up in regular record stores in 2025?

i second this query. it's just too much.

i have no inside information but i would guess there will be an easily accessible vinyl version in both online and brick-and-mortar stores next year.

Monorail Music taking pre-orders for the cindy lee 3xLP black vinyl (£64.99)and 2CD (26.99)

was just about to post same - uk release feb 25.

Norman Records also taking pre-orders Vinyl Triple LP £66.49 and 2CD £26.99

£26.99 for 2 CDs? I knew the 90s were hip again but that feels a little cheeky

Base download price being $20 over here, $24 for CD, doesn't seem that much more; if you want to say it's not worth that, hey, they're judging what the market will bear. (And sales are bearing that out -- it's approaching nearly 2500 copies in all formats sold via Bandcamp now. However you want to measure it, in terms of scale, that's still a raging success -- even if all the purchases were just downloads, which they clearly aren't, that would come out to $50,000 made already. No it's not Taylor Swift numbers but it was clearly never going to be, but in terms of numbers set against the fact that you can still stream it for free on YouTube and on Bandcamp, that's really remarkable in terms of it being available that way in just one day's time.)

where are you seeing sales on Bandcamp, Ned? do you have access to numbers that aren't public-facing? or have i been missing something?

On Bandcamp there is a "supported by" view on the right that shows all the people that have downloaded or purchased the album. You have to click "more" repeatedly to see all of them, and then do the counting to get an idea of how many little icons it adds up to (each row is ten people).

And if you have purchased it, bandcamp tells you how many other people have it in their collection

What Mizzell said. Literally the exact number right now is 2405 purchases of some sort -- there's no further breakdown than that, which is why my earning guess starts at the lowest possible baseline, which is $20 for a digital download. But in reality it has to be a lot higher than that, though of course revenue splits between Cindy Lee, Superior Viaduct and the automatic Bandcamp share in some fashion.

now on Spotify, it was apparently taken down earlier but now it's back up? it's under Cindy Lee's artist page so maybe it's legit now? idk

https://www.brooklynvegan.com/cindy-lees-diamond-jubilee-finally-hits-spotify-other-streaming-services/

UPDATE! It turns out the Diamond Jubilee streams were not official. The label Superior Viaduct is having them taken down now. You can still listen on Bandcamp or Youtube though. Do so below.

what I'm confused about is that the upload is (it's still up) under their artist page - so can anyone upload anything under artist pages? can I upload my new album on Taylor Swift's page? I'm thinking one cannot because otherwise people would be trying to game streams all the time that way (I've heard it happening before but my understanding is that they created a whole new page, like another Beyoncé or whatever)

Still up on Apple Music. Maybe just the Spotify stream was unofficial? Confusing!

Still up on Spotify. Enjoy it while it lasts? I'll buy the CD anyway when it comes out anyway.