One way to get into the mystical realm of Diamond Jubilee, former-Women member Patrick Flegel’s crowning achievement as alter ego Cindy Lee, is to inspect its incisive cover. Dipped in faded blue, Lee sits contemplatively before a grain elevator that symbolises a storehouse of memory. Because it’s also a terminal, whatever is stored there is only there temporarily, but the leftover sound remains unchanged: the sonority of loss, monumental and indelible.
Diamond Jubilee captures that essence through cheap recordings of blaring electric riffs, episodic orchestra, and unsynchronised intervals of drums. The melange of influences from the decade the title celebrates – the 1960s – is what makes it a most remarkable fixture in a year obsessed with redefining pop and succeeding only minimally. Within its well-established, tumbledown atmosphere, you may come across a synth that sounds out of the period, an eruptive and drastic shift from one genre to another within one song. Lee, with a determination to distort the concept of boundaries, creates something that becomes lost in time, an uncanny blurring of familiarity and alienation.
The elusive and unidentified "you's" that Lee sings to (often in despair) add to the allure of Diamond Jubilee. They could refer to a person, a group of people, ideas, or beliefs; the crucial clue is that Lee’s love for the subject is immense. Regardless of the identity, what's left is a ghost of unfinished feelings, promises, ideologies, philosophies. When thinking of the past has become an escape for many, Diamond Jubilee is a coronation of that very sense, sounding one more resonance, a sublime contribution to a loss that disrupts interior time. “This world was haunted,” they cried on “Golden Microphone.” “All I wanted / I want is you.”
