Cindy Lee - What’s Tonight To Eternity

Is What's Tonight to Eternity the moment where Cindy Lee finally steps into the light she richly deserves? I wouldn't bet everything you have on it, but now she's signed with W.25th it does at least mean this record is being presented in a more accessible way rather than uploaded to some obscure Geocities hosted site or on impossible to locate cassette. Crucially, it doesn't dim the mystery. Lee remains as beguiling and wraith-like as ever, a lonely ghost in the machine transmitting love letters to the disaffected. As always with Lee, the song titles do half the work on their own, describing the unique alterna-universe she's built over the last few albums - One Second to Toe the Line, Just for Loving You I Pay the Price, the title track... consider it another notch on the bed post of the poetry of longing. But what makes What's Tonight to Eternity, and indeed all of Lee's work, so remarkable is how she's able to combine nursery rhyme like melody with more challenging sonic and emotional ideas, never once taking the easy option. I Want You to Suffer transposes a dreamy lullaby into coruscating noise abstraction, while Lucifer Stand glides along on a synth-guided laser beam and a devastatingly poignant vocal, a march of the weeping robots if you will. There's elements of Alex Zhang Hungtai's Dirty Beaches and Yuza Iwata's remarkable Daylight Moon, and in a way I see Cindy Lee in a similar way to Dean Blunt, both precocious and prolific, the more they produce, the less knowable they become. There's probably infinite wisdom locked somewhere inside here, though I'm too dumb to understand it. Needless to say, there wont be many better this year.