Cindy Lee

Former Women's frontman Patrick Flegel launched his own project, Cindy Lee, and started performing cross-dressed in order to impersonate the female Cindy. This was the real, although melancholy, continuation of Women's lo-fi pop.

The demo cassette Tatlashea (Isolated Now Waves, 2012), horribly recorded, shows bigger ambitions: the eleven-minute prog-blues jam Find Another Man and lengthy loose slocore ballad Head Down.

Malenkost (Isolated Now Waves, 2015) is still largely amateurish. The noisy instrumental vignettes Cash Money and I�ve Seen His Face Before are trivial. The violent atonal repetition of No Worth No Cost and the loud clangor of Coroner Of The State are not effective. The slow stately Always Lovers, the prayer-like Claim Of Vanity and the upbeat poppy A Message From The Aching Sky seem out of context, like an attempt to sell out in an album full of avantgarde experiments.

One month later he released a much more accomplished album. Act of Tenderness (CCQSK, 2015) is neatly divided in two. At one end of the spectrum are simple ethereal songs: the mostly a-cappella lullabye Power and Possession, the angelic slocore elegy The Last Train's Come And Gone, the romantic 1950s-style weeper Wandering And Solitude and the almost religious hymn A New Love Is Believing. At the other end of the spectrum are the schizoid songs buried in distortion: New Romance (with a coda of pure musique concrete), Quit Doing Me Wrong (even if it ends in Leo Kottke-esque fingerpicking) and especially Bonsai Garden, which is basically an expressionist scream being swallowed into a black hole of feedback noise). Sometimes his search for the unorthodox melody make him sounds like a less capable Syd Barrett, notably in What I Need.

Model Express (CCQSK, 2018) is a compilation of rarities and unfinished experiments.

There is much confusion in What's Tonight to Eternity? (West 25th, 2020) but also some gems. The confusion is evident in the seven-minute I Want You To Suffer, which begins in a horror atmosphere, turns to a pounding distorted voodoobilly, plunges into a savage wall of noise, and ends with a moving organ-driven hymn, with mixed results. Nonetheless, his creative mind crafts a sort of Chinese reggae in One Second To Toe The Line. Speaking From Above is another demonic noise-pop number: a child singing a nursery rhyme over a steady synth-pop beat while walled inside a brutal mechanism. The seven-minute standout Lucifer Stand opens as a jug-blues a` la Norman Greenbaum's Spirit in the Sky, after which synth, guitar and percussion drive a martial pounding dance over which androgynous vocals intone a romantic melody a` la girl-groups of the 1960s. Flegel again seems to be nostalgic about the grandiose arias of the 1950s, e.g. in To The Limit, bording on orchestral kitsch muzak in Heavy Metal. He is at the same time a retro-pop revivalist and an avantgarde experimenter, a rare combination.

Two months later Flegel released his most accessible album yet, Cat o' Nine Tails (Realistik, 2020) titled after Dario Argento's giallo of 1971. Somehoe he decided to venture into classical music with brief instrumentals that sound like variations on Bach's toccatas and fugues (notably Cat O' Nine Tails and Cat O' Nine Tails III). He then indulges in atmospheric guitar vignettes like Faith Restored and I Don't Want To Fall In Love Again that echo tunes of the 1960s, a case of almost paranoid dejavu. And finally there are the waltzing retro-lullabyes Love Remains and Bondage Of The Mind, which again fly back to the 1950s.