Cindy Lee is the performance project of Canadian artist Patrick Flegel, who until now was best known as frontman of post-punk band Woman. ‘Diamond Jubilee’ has catipulted him to indie-notoriety in a way that feels endearingly old-fashioned; a pitchfork rave and some blog attention and suddenly Cindy Lee is the name on everyone’s lips. This dizzyingly ambitious double album is only available through YouTube and a Geocitoes website, and yet it’s quietly becoming one of the most acclaimed indie albums of recent years.
‘Diamond Jubilee’ will remind different listeners of different eras. Some will be directly transported back to the golden age of pop: the doo-wop chord changes, girl group melodies, British Invasion guitars and sense of melodrama etc. the lo-fi aesthetic and almost ghostly quality will remind others of early 90s alt-rock (there is something a little bit Guided by Voices about it all). For me personally, the record is reminiscent of the nostalgic and brittle indie pop I fell in love with in the late 00s – Girls, Ariel Pink, The Drums, Washed Out. The album’s presentation, and the context around it, is also suggestive of a time before algorithms and social media. In a world of protracted album roll outs and overzealous PR, it’s refreshing to stumble across a record the old fashioned way.
Flegel has created a whole world. An ode to romanticism and memory. A mood. This is an album you can put on and get lost in. Individual tracks, valleys and peaks, become part of a greater whole. It’s a journey. He constructs songs that have a classic sensibility, and in many respects feel straightforward enough. They take simple conceits – a break up, a dream, a memory – and pair them with catchy melodies. But there is something uncanny pulling at the edges. The inherent classicism is filtered through a distinctly modern queerness. The songs generally bloom into expansive instrumentals where Flegal’s tasteful and often caustic guitar solos take on the emotional heavy lifting. Feedback disrupts and disrupts just as you find things getting a little too quiet.
Across 32 tracks, the highlights are spread fairly evenly. There are some groovy diversions (‘Olive Drab’ locks into an orchestral funk, ‘Dracula’ offers soulful disco and ‘GAYBLEVISION’ is like a long lost theme tune to an 80s cop drama) but I personally have more of a soft spot for the introspective ballads. These are songs that most directly invoke a ghostly longing for somebody or something beyond arm’s reach: ‘Always Dreaming’, Dreams of You’, ‘All I Want Is You’ – you get the idea. The highlight is Kingdom Come’ which filters a ‘Strawberry Swing’ guitar-line through chambers of reverb until it sounds like something plucked from your most obscure memories. At the song’s end Flegel sings ‘I miss you dear friend, I heard your music playing far away’ which sums up the feeling of being so near, and yet so far removed, from a time and place; the feeling of bittersweet remembrance. It also evokes the sensation I feel when listening to ‘Diamond Jubilee’ as a whole; of hearing something both alien and familiar. Old and new. Comforting and challenging. You don’t come across this kind of record very often anymore.
Taylor Swift has always been kind of insufferable – and I say this as someone who hasgonetobat for her many times. In the early days i deemed that insuffarbility to be an inevitable consequence of the same traits that I found so endearing: her unguarded sincerity, her youthful precociousness, her ambition. If she sometimes over-egged a metaphor or came across as a little try-hard then that was part of her charm. But as time has passed, Taylor’s more grating qualities have become harder and harder to see past; mainly because she is seemingly absolutely everywhere all the time. Aside from the sheer quantity of music she has put out over the past five years (nearly 220 tracks, including the re-recordings) there is the never ending, economy boosting-‘Eras’ tour, the Movies and Disney+ making-of’s, the magazine covers and gossip columns, the streaming records and university courses etc. Escaping Taylor swift has become impossible and, even for a fan like myself, it’s incredibly cloying.
Weirdly, this has all coalesced with some of the most disappointing music of her career. The various ‘Taylor’s versions’ that have come out have paired great albums with an abundance of unnecessary outtakes and bonus tracks. Her Grammy award winning ‘Midnights’ was a salty synth-pop record that left me completely unmoved. All of which recently prompted Neil Tennant (of Pet Shop Boys) to ask ‘what is Taylor Swift’s ‘Billie Jean’? Shake It Off? I listened to that the other day and it is not ‘Billie Jean’, is it.”Which… he’s not wrong.
You can have too much of a good thing. And in recent years we have had too much of a Taylor Swift thing. And this album is CERTAINLY too much. ‘The Tortured Poets Department’ is being billed as either a one disc or double disc album, depending on which edition you buy. Either way, it’s too long; It just depends whether your version is four songs too long or fourteen. There are plenty of peaks here spread across two hours – some of her best all out pop songs since ‘1989’ – but the dips are just as plentiful. Ultimately they all start to blur into one long slog anyway. The mood is introspective and bitter to a fault so It’s hard to imagine anyone comfortably sitting through two hours of this stuff (though the numerous reaction videos popping up across social media seem to suggest that some people have indeed experienced it that way).
The record chronicles the demise of two relationships and the start of a third. Matty Healey, Travis Kelcee and Joe Alwyn feature prominently in some cryptic, and some not so cryptic, ways. For a fan of both Taylor Swift and The 1975, I find it captivating; the references to The Blue Nile (Marty’s favourite band), a ‘tattooed golden retriever’, chocolate, typewriters and Jehovah’s whiteness suits… it‘s funny. Maybe a bit of Matty has seeped into Taylor’s writing style too – at one point she rhymes ‘Aristotle’ with ‘touch me while your bros play Grand Theft Auto’… yikes.
For me personally, it’s clear to hear the slight improvements over predecessor ‘Midnights’. It has a tighter lyrical focus for a start, and identifies a definite itch to scratch. As much as ‘Midnights’ did well to manoeuvre away from heartbreak, there’s no doubt Taylor Swift sounds more at home singing about this stuff. It’s still thrilling to hear her find new ways to articulate the blessings of new love (‘Tortured Poets Department’), how it stagnates (‘loml’) and the peculiarly devastating effects on day to day living (the description of breaking down at the gym on ‘Down Bad’ is perfect). On top of which you’ve got plenty of the kind of vindictive put downs we found on ‘Reputation’ and ‘Midnights’ as well as the more mature and distant reflections she experimented with on ‘Folklore’ and ‘Evermore’.
A large chunk of the record is completely forgettable, but, and this is something of a music writer cliche, there is a great twelve track album in here trying to get out. I love the moody sleeze of ‘Down Bad’ and the playful melodrama of ‘My Boy Only Breaks His Own Toys.’ And I love the moments where Taylor seems genuinely uninhibited; the crunchy alt-rock of ‘So High School’ and the decaying disco of ‘I Can Do it With a Broken Heart.’ And, mostly, I appreciate the moments where she just says it exactly as it is. No subterfuge, no metaphor, no irony. ‘I love you, it’s ruining my life’ on lead single ‘Fortnight’, which says everything that needs to be said. Or that moment on ‘LOML’ where she sounds positively broken – ‘you said that I’m the love of your life like a hundred times.’ These lyrics prick through the pretence; they speak to something more deeply felt. She’s still funny, too – ‘You’re not Dylan Thomas, I’m not Patti Smith, this ain’t the Chelsea Hotel, we’re modern idiots’ – which is as good a critique of Matty Healey as I’ve ever heard from a music journalist.
There’s a moment on the reasonably riveting ‘But Daddy I Love Him’ where Taylor exposes her greatest fear (which also happens to be an actual reality): ‘So tell me everything is not about me… but what if it is?’ For someone who built an identity around being an underdog (‘Mean’, ‘You Belong to Me’, ‘Tim McGraw’) it must feel like a blessing and a curse to be the literal Time Person of the Year TM. Everything is about her; it’s boring for us and must be exhausting for her. But at moments across ‘TTPD’ you hear the real human being behind the accolades struggling to make herself heard. You hear glimpses of the old Taylor.
And let’s not get it twisted – Taylor Swift still knows her way around a simile. Some of my favourites from ‘TTPD’ include: ‘I crash the party like a record scratch’, ‘the smoke cloud billows out his mouth like a steam train through a little town’, ‘you look like Stevie Nicks in ‘75’, ‘quick, quick tell me something awful, like you are a poet trapped inside the body of a finance guy.’ Ok, maybe that last one was a little goofy. But that’s always been part of Taylor’s charm; she risks goofiness in the pursuit of greater truth. If anything, there’s not enough of that coming through this time around. Like ‘Midnights’ (and arguably even ‘Evermore’ and ‘Folklore’) ‘TTPD’s seriousness ultimately feels suffocating. That’s amplified by the unadventurous production which generally emphasises steely beats and melancholic piano accompaniments that grow in intensity before snapping back like slingshots. Sabrina Carpenter’s ‘Espresso’ is currently number one and it’s a great example of how silly pop music can afford to be. Taylor Swift knew that when she wrote ‘We are Never getting back together’ and ‘22.’ No longer.
Remember when she rendered her experiences in brightly coloured, felt tip pen? Her songs felt less like poems and more like doodles written in the margin. Her writing was unselfconsciously diaristic. You felt like you were being allowed access to a secret stash of love letters. That’s rarely the case here. There is a self-conscious importance placed on songs that can’t handle the weight; she writes like she knows we will be listening and expecting. The second half in particular is crippled by this: ‘Cassandra’, a self pitying piano ballad about ‘burning the bitch’, ‘The Bolter’, a self pitying piano ballad about the girl whose friends laughed behind her back, ‘The Manuscript’, a self pitying piano ballad about a torrid affair… you get the idea. It eventually feels turgid. There is such limited musicality expressed across the record, and such unimaginative production from Jack Antinoff and (particularly) Aaron Desnor (both of whom should really be challenging her more), that the record lives and dies by the quality of writing.
The things I initially responded to coming out of the mouth of a teenage girl are considerably less charming now that she’s a 34 year old woman with the world’s eyes fixed upon her every move. That Taylor was un-self conscious, this Taylor is almost smugly self aware. That Taylor knew how to have fun, this Taylor is a bore. That Taylor didn’t hit the ceiling because she didn’t know how high it went. This Taylor hit it years ago. She spends so much time on ‘TTPD’ second guessing our expectations, laying out clues for online sleuths and playing to the gallery that it starts to feel claustrophobic. The passion has curdled and soured in all the wrong ways. There’s a sense in which Taylor Swift is no longer writing love songs – she’s writing punchlines.
Big Thief’s Adrianne Lenker is on a run of form that bares legitimate comparison to Neil Young in the early 70s or Prince in the 80s. Since 2019’s wonderful double hitter (‘U.F.O.F’ and ‘Two Hands’) she has barely put a foot wrong. 2020’s solo release ‘Songs’ and its companion piece ‘Instrumentals’ made waves during lockdown while 2022’s double album ‘New Warm Mountain I Believe In You’ was Big Theif’s finest work to date; a sprawling and daring dive into new sounds and ideas. Big Thief have been on an extensive tour ever since, occasionally releasing brilliant singles along the way while road testing new material; some of which appears here on ‘Bright Future’, Lenker’s fifth solo album.
Recently listening to Lenker’s 2014 debut ‘Hours were the Birds’, I was again reminded of how tightly wound and nervy her early songs were. Cautious. Tentative. The guitar rhythms felt springy. Her double track voice was little more than a whisper. On ‘Bright Future’ the energy has loosened considerably. In essence, these songs breathe more. They pause. You can hear the tape hiss, the strings twang, voices murmur in the background. The pace has slackened and Lenker leans into the deeply felt emotions behind the music. If at times that gives them the unvarnished quality of demo recordings then that feels like part of the picture.
The songs on ‘Bright Future’, sound as old as the hills. Lenker’s melodies and thoughts flow so naturally, so inevitably, they can feel almost preordained. Yet the recordings themselves imbue the songs with a live spontaneity; they unfurl spontaneously in the moment and are captured live to tape. At least that’s how it feels. ‘Vampire Empire’, my favourite song of 2023, has been re-recorded as a sort of round the camp-fire sing-song. ‘Sadness as a Gift’ debuted as a full band performance on Big Thief’s most recent tour is here presented in a more laidback setting. Musicians Nick Hakim and Mat Davidson contribute close harmonises, providing a sort of anchor to Lenker’s frequent flights of fancy. These songs are two of the finest she is has ever written.
As a whole though, ‘Bright Future’ might add up to slightly less than the sun of its parts. Taken on their own, these songs are often impeccable but together they start to become a little repetitive; particularly in the context of Adrianne Lenker’s recent career. The record doesn’t feel as expansive as ‘New Warm Mountain I Believe in you’, as carefully curated as ‘Songs’ or as sonically daring as ‘U. F. O. F’. Do we need ‘EVOL’, a creative writing excessive put to music, or ‘Donut Seem’, an ecological plea built around a fairly terrible pun? But these brief diversions, while a little silly, might actually be what the record needs more of. Moments of lightness and levity to dispel the darkness. Elsewhere, the tone and tempo rarely fluctuate; the mood is introspective to a fault (the six minutes of autobiographical unloading on album opener ‘Real House’ feels particularly indulgent) and the stripped back arrangements start of miss the contributions of Lenker’s Big Thief band mates.
And still – I keep coming back to the strength of songwriting. The record ends with a track that already feels like a minor landmark in Lenker’s discography. ‘Ruined’ is a plaintive break-up ballad, theoretically similar to ones she’s written many times before, but this one is particularly sparse and fragile. It’s almost cavernous in depth and darkness, beginning with a direct anecdote about seeing an ex pass by, before ending in a series of mysterious metaphors (jewelled vests, water soaked pillows and drooping ferns). Her voice here barely breaks above the melancholic chords, bashed out on an old piano. The chorus, which evokes pure longing, could almost describe how her fans feel right now. ‘Can’t get enough of you / you come around, I’m ruined.’ Gold streaks don’t last forever but as long as Adrianne Lenker keeps on making songs as moving as this, there is no sign of her’s coming to an end.
Pop goes the Weasel 