Having already reached an incredible critical response with its digital only release last year, Superior Viaduct’s W.25th imprint delivers the long-awaited physical editions - stunning X2 CD and X3 LP editions - of “Diamond Jubilee”, a towering masterstroke by Cindy Lee, and easily one of the most anticipated releases we’ll encounter this year. An absolute marvel of post-modern hybridity and song craft, that returns us to a time when pop albums were towering statements to be immersed in and experienced as a whole, this is a rare one that surpasses every expectation that we could call to mind.

With good reason, we sing the praises of the San Francisco based imprint, Superior Viaduct, at regular intervals. Since their founding in 2011, they have emerged as one of the premier labels for archival releases and reissues of ambitious underground and experimental music, often making the improbable and impossible real with some of the greatest holy grails in the history of sound. While their primary efforts are deserving of all the praise, it’s easy to allow them to overshadow the label’s support for the present and contemporary landscape of adventurous music through their sub imprint W.25th. Since its launch in 2016, it’s slowly delivered incredible LPs by Laraaji & Sun Araw, Exek, Cube, Cover of Secret Passage, Gavilán Rayna Russom, Ellen Arkbro, Cuneiform Tabs, and a number of others, and now they return with “Diamond Jubilee”, the critically beloved magnum opus by Cindy Lee, the performance and songwriting vehicle of Canadian musician Patrick Flegel.

Cindy Lee, the wry and fiercely independent creative vehicle of Patrick Flegel, was born from the ashes of the widely celebrated post-punk project, Women, within which Flegel contributed lead vocals and guitar, and the short-lived Androgynous Mind project that he embarked upon following the tragic circumstances that led to the dissolution of the band that he had formed with three of his childhood friends. Over the course of more than a decade, Cindy Lee - primarily a solo vehicle with a rotating cast of contributors - has steadily picked up critical acclaim with six full lengths, the majority of which have found a home on W.25th, and a handful of EPs, threading the pure pleasures of DIY indie-pop with a sense of artistry, honesty, and ease that feels rare in that realm.

While the pure pleasure of listening to Cindy Lee stands on its own, there are dimensions to the project that move beyond what first appears to be a simple and elegant gesture of pop infused indie rock: an awareness of history; the power, emotive, and cultural importance of music in our lives; its social and political potential, and a pointed distaste for its corruption under the influence of money and fame. Not only is Cindy Lee’s music stripped to an elemental and poetic essence - feeling raw, heartfelt, and direct in the way that classic 1960s recordings and early DIY releases of Daniel Johnston and Sebadoh do - but the project has equally served as a prescient and charged challenge to perceptions connected to gender through Flegel’s cross-dressing performances, stating: “[…] combining 'cross dressing' with live performance, over time [...] became a way to reinforce me doing something that I love doing that I often withhold from myself. I have been perplexed by the novelty in peoples eyes of what I see as a very basic and very traditional performance on my part.”

The slowly gathering momentum of Cindy Lee over the years has encountered Flegel combining sublimely delicate melodic moments with passages of pure experimentation. “Diamond Jubilee” encounters them pushing the heights of song-craft into centre stage, drawing upon the subjects, sentiments, and moods of timeless love and longing, weaving a sprawling journey that spans 32 songs over the course of 2 hours, recorded over the course of a number of years between Toronto, Durham, Calgary and Montreal.

While undeniably infused with the spirit of punk and the golden age of bedroom DIY 4-track recordings, “Diamond Jubilee” equally nods toward something of a golden age of pop: where the album was to be experienced as a total form made up of discrete statements, and a lost time when pop could hold great cultural significance without selling out and sacrificing integrity. Cocooned in a dreamy, reverb-drenched haze, not only does “Diamond Jubilee” seem to nostalgically seek lost moments in each of our lives, but return us to a relationship to music in the world, and a coming together through it, that was left behind in another time.

A playful and unselfconsciously sentimental post-modern hybrid that incorporates elements of numerous musical idioms - krautrock, 60s pop, 90s dream pop and indie rock - into a timeless form, playfully infused with a peppering of kitsch, Cindy Lee’s “Diamond Jubilee” takes up the challenge laid by widely celebrated, large scale recording projects like George Harrison’s “All Things Must Pass” and Magnetic Fields’ “69 Love Songs”, and delivers a statement equal in its potent effect. Truly remarkable on every level, it’s one of those records that returns you to the pure joys of being a listener and the power of the song.