Eraserhead Meets the Wall of Sound

It’s been five years since Women unofficially broke up, and three since the tragic passing of Women guitarist Christopher Reimer. Since then, Matthew Flegel and Michael Wallace have formed Viet Cong, made a couple of really well-received records and promised to change their name. Patrick Flegel, on the other hand, has formed three bands (Fels-Naptha, Androgynous Mind and Cindy Lee), released some really limited edition tapes and changed the name of Fels-Naptha (to Phil’s Knapsack).

That’s about as far as the parallels go, though. If Viet Cong is a manifestation of Women’s extant pop sensibilities, then Cindy Lee is a manifestation of the band’s most obstinate and experimental demons. For instance, “No Worth No Cost,” the opener to Cindy Lee’s Malenkost cassette (released just last month), sounds like something Paul Leary might have recorded at the peak of the Butthole Surfers’ debauchery. And “Aboriginal Sin” (from Cindy Lee’s 2012 debut tape, Tatlashea) is pure psych-noise, full of distorted-as-hell pedalboard vocals and guitars that just can’t get along (even by Flegel’s rather obtuse standards).

Despite the fact that it’s the most structured Cindy Lee release to date, Act of Tenderness may actually be Cindy Lee’s most daring release to date. There are definitely some excellent pop songs here, but they’re so anachronistic and alien – so buried under noise and dissonance – that it would take some pretty serious excavation to get them chart-ready. But this is no accident. Like some sort of noise-pop cryptographer, Patrick Flegel has seemingly drawn from the likes of the Ronettes, The Residents, Link Wray and Merzbow to create an airtight cipher to both protect his songs from prying ears and reward repeat listeners.

Act of Tenderness opens with the title track, a droney, slightly sick-sounding piece which seems to be wrought entirely of feedbacky bowed guitars and voices so saturated with reverb that they’ve ceased to be voices at all. Interestingly, it bears somewhat of a resemblance to “Can’t You See,” the first track from Women’s brilliant Public Strain. But instead of launching into an upbeat number like “Heat Distraction,” it melts into the sorrowful “Power and Possession,” which features a number of Flegels singing beautiful, off-kilter harmonies in some gigantic marble wilderness, eventually joined by percussive surf guitars. Bubblegum tear-jerkers like “Don’t say another word / Don’t break my heart in two” have never sounded so tragic and heavy-hearted. If Lynch’s Lady in the Radiator had sung this to Henry Spencer instead of “In Heaven,” no one would be the wiser.

Tone firmly established, Flegel proceeds seemingly without caution. “What I Need,” a somewhat more upbeat love song, features a simple saw synth and sounds like it was recorded by someone’s boyfriend on a portable tape recorder just before that someone went away to summer camp. “New Romance” is an Ivesian mass of heavily distorted/modulated guitar and dark tunnel vocals that don’t fit together at all. Notably, this and the other two mercilessly noisy tracks (“Bonsai Garden” and “Miracle of the Rose”) are the most challenging parts of Act of Tenderness, and while they all have their moments (there’s a truly lovely song under all the distorted violin sawing in “Miracle of the Rose”), it’s hard to say that they’re worth the challenge. For all the juxtaposition, there is none of the synchronicity or magical interplay that typically give such experiments life.

Luckily, the rest of the record is filled with gems like “Come and Gone,” a warm but mournful tune in which Flegel delivers one-two punches like “I’m a fool, but not for you” in a Miss Piggy-esque falsetto over guitars that sound plucked from yet another unlikely source (King Crimson’s “Book of Saturday”). And the exquisite “Operation” sounds like an extraterrestrial 60s girl group – perhaps led by Cindy Lee herself? – rehearsing with a LinnDrum and some synth bells in an abandoned warehouse. “Quit Doing Me Wrong” is another Ives-inspired piece, this time bearing fruit, and “Fallen Angel” sounds like soundtrack music for an homage to an homage… the Angulos’ take on Pulp Fiction, maybe.

The album closes with two relatively undecorated pieces of melancholia, “Wandering and Solitude” and “A New Love is Believing.” Though they both sound irretrievably distant (picture a couple balloons flying off into the stratosphere), Flegel’s decision to refrain from whitewashing these closing numbers with noise makes them shockingly present and human. In the album’s final moments, the school-band-soundtracking-a-30s-movie-with-no-music-budget of “A New Love is Believing” is snatched away as if by cartoon mice, leaving a void that can only be filled with another go at the thing.

Whether or not Patrick Flegel is pulling a Prince and turning Cindy Lee into his own Camille, whether or not he’s trying to keep his loyal listeners at arm’s length by obscuring his pop sensibilities in noise and dissonance, whether or not he’s just trying to weird out as many squares as possible (peep that trippy cover)… he’s succeeding. Act of Tenderness is, at times, a deeply challenging listen, but it is also a very rewarding listen, and a harbinger of good things to come.