Cindy Lee is the 60s girl group persona of Pat Flegel, once the voice of now-defunct indie pop outfit Women. Though his former band flirted with sounds of the past, Flegel now follows through, bending the root of pop nostalgia to more amorphous realms in similarly brilliant fashion as Suicide or Robert Wyatt. Coined as “confrontational pop”, Cindy Lee distills ingenuous and saccharine sounds into a more eerie, unsettling fog.
As Cindy Lee’s first long-form statement, Act Of Tenderness (the new album out on Maple Death Records) makes use of antipodal themes to create a living sound: static with grace, distortion and sugar, all masterfully arranged with crooked nods toward pop classicism.