Cindy Lee – “Dracula”

Music cultivated like Cindy Lee isn’t entirely anything new, but maybe we’ve just forgotten over the past decade and a half what creating independent art beyond considerations to algorithm and playlist goals is like. The freak folks of the Aughts cassette culture boom would tell you that much, and as formerly part of the great, underrated, combustible Canadian art rock outfit, WOMEN, the drag persona of Patrick Flegel knows what it’s like to beat your own path when all your peers are pondering the commercially viable. Many standouts tell this story from Cindy Lee’s immersive latest effort, the double album Diamond Jubilee, but its “Dracula” that’s an apt centerpiece which rediscovers the broader view of this. Stitching together forgotten facets from the rock landscape without necessarily needing to bend toward cohesion, Flegel’s voice — a shadowed specter forged from inspiration of pop girl groups of the retro radio dial — transmits itself through a churn of hypnotic base layer of psychedelically stretched guitars and unhurried drum. They’re in no rush across the six-minute zone-out, matching the lethargic longing in their bleaker existential woe. “I’m living like Dracula / My heart is made of stone / And I’m all alone.” A holy trinity of gothic, high, and molded from a singular cool inspiration unbothered by the rest of the world around it, there’s still blood left to squeeze in indie rock as art.

Cindy Lee’s Diamond Jubilee is available now on
Realistik Studios.