Cindy Lee - What's Tonight to Eternity

Cindy Lee's What's Tonight to Eternity sounds like a 1960s girl-group ballad leaking through a haunted radio, lovely one moment and genuinely unsettling the next.

Cindy Lee is the project of Canadian musician Patrick Flegel, formerly of the cult indie band Women, and this fifth album arrived in 2020. Flegel recorded it almost entirely alone at their own Realistik Studios in Montreal, drawing thematic inspiration from the life of Karen Carpenter, whose story of fame and exploitation struck a deeply personal chord. The record was longlisted for that year's Polaris Music Prize.

Plastic Raincoat opens in a dreamy haze, vocals strained and distant. I Want You to Suffer is the centrepiece, a seven-and-a-half-minute epic that collapses from fragile art-pop into a wall of noise before limping back at a slow, grieving pace. Lucifer Stand turns menacing, pulsing with dark synths and ending on an unnerving spoken testimony. The closer, Heavy Metal, is a hazy, old-fashioned ballad with a noisy edge, written in tribute to Flegel's late Women bandmate Chris Reimer.

Flegel's falsetto often sits far back in the echo, which is exactly the point.

It is a record of strange beauty and real darkness, best heard alone in the evening with the volume up enough to catch every crackle and ghostly harmony.