That’s two tracks – yes, thirty-two – for over two hours of music. Don’t worry, it’s not an unexpected new Taylor Swift album. “Diamond Jubilee” is the perfect antithesis to the music from hype fleeting and celebration via social media. I believe that none of these songs will find space in a Netflix series (perhaps in a dystopian future?), no one will celebrate Cindy Lee as the star of the third millennium (purely artistic identity), nor will Spotify reel off data on billions of streams at no cost (not is available on the platform).
God, but also Lucifer, bless Patrick Flegel, ex-member of the Canadian post-punk band Women, a group dissolved after just two albums from which the first structure of the Viet Cong and therefore of the Preoccupations was born. But “Diamond Jubilee” is the most irreverent and genuine album of recent years, a masterpiece of transformism and artistic nihilism. The surprise is that these thirty-two instructions for using the seven notes are the result of Patrick’s alter-ego, that is, the version drag queen Cindy Lee, and it’s a punch in the face to the mainstream indie-rock – after all, the Women’s career ended with a fistfight mid-tour.
The noise of the edgy post-punk of Viet Cong/Preoccupations has distracted attention from the new project, but with “Diamond Jubilee” the pieces of the mosaic fall into place. After all, the real revolution of pop and rock music is contained in the volatility and incoherence of the most radical pop art.
The first forming element is the abandonment of trance psychedelic and the display of dissonances and feedback performed on previous albums. Here everything is functional to a devious, visceral and romantic song format. “Diamond Jubilee” is like an imaginary compilation of unreleased songs from the seminal pop and rock bands of the 60s and 70s; there title trackin introducing the long sequence, says everything and nothing about the music offered by Cindy Lee, a folk-pop ballad that becomes a real groove with a seductive impalpable nature.
With a disproportionate amount of songs and melodic ideas it becomes impossible to give a detailed account of the album. Perhaps this was Flegel’s real objective, that is to force the listener into an overall enjoyment that did not privilege any of the tracks. The Lennon-ian “Glitz” and the languid Velvet Underground-esque melody of “Baby Blue” are just a taste of what “Diamond Jubilee” offers. The essence of the project is sometimes contained in light-footed songs, but the continuous references to Karen Carpenter in “Dreams Of You” and “I Have My Doubts” are the keystone of the album’s raison d’être: the the conscious emotional fragility of these two songs is in fact shocking. The new project by Cindy Lee/Patrick Flegel, in short, is a zombie record, rather than quotes or influences they are real exhumations of excellent corpses.
The suggestions of film music in a dub key of “Olive Drab”, the folk-hippie-psych mysticism of “All I Want Is You”, the dark dissonances of “Demon Bitch”, the glam and hard scratch tempered by harp, chords skewed guitar and no-sex choruses of “Always Dreaming”, la dark-longue-music of “Le Machiniste Fantome”, the psychedelic soul of “Dracula” and the synth-pop of “GAYBLEVISION”, the volatile pop of “Golden Microphone”, the complex psych-rock of “If You Here Me Crying”, the blues of “To Heal This Wounded Heart”, and the darker and more contaminated “Lockstepp”: these are just some of the variables of a project to be enjoyed in a single indissoluble sequence.
“Diamond Jubilee” is the album that Ariel Pink has always dreamed of releasing, and that Guided By Voices used to release in their early days (who remembers the splendid “Self-Inflected Aerial Nostalgia”?), a set of pop-bignamis unconventional rock, with at least a couple of shocking tracks: “Darling Of The Diskoteque” and “Dont Tell Me Im Wrong”, two bold and extreme immersions in melancholy that immediately stand as candidates among the songs to keep from recent years.
The true merit of the Canadian musician’s latest album is that of having disturbed the rules of discography with a record that is currently non-existent, harmless and non-revolutionary, but rich in an exaggerated quantity of harmonic, lyrical, melodic and stylistic ideas that could nourish dozens and dozens of albums and successful careers.
In the meantime, the announced vinyl version is among the most anticipated releases of the year, for those who don’t have patience, you can listen to it easily on YouTube.
05/07/2024
