How far from an actual disco can dance music get? Chromatics and Junior Boys make a sort of dance music suitable for transit-- steeped in typical club-friendly sonics, their records are the soundtrack to the drive home from the club rather than the night out itself. Taken to its logical extreme, is it possible to make a sort of dance music as a completely disembodied observer? Los Angeles' Ramona Gonzalez, under the name Nite Jewel, seems set on finding the answer.
Like the phrase "Nite Jewel" itself, Good Evening is minuscule and precious, both of which are charming descriptors, but its fragility is taken to an almost palpable extent. Once the record gets past a certain volume in headphones (it doesn't take much), you can faintly hear recording buzz splitting it apart at the seams. Take "Suburbia": Underneath Gonzalez's incorporeal wail, nothing feels concrete, despite the insistent and simple repetition. The leading synth blurt falls in and out of tune while the four-on-the-floor kick drum threatens to go into slack triplets. Any quantizing feature could "solve" this problem, but is seeing the stitching part of the appeal? The whole appeal? On "What Did He Say", the most immediately striking track on Good Evening, there's a nifty bassline but the moment it modulates up a couple of steps, the mix turns to mush. If you've ever played a preset song on a Casio and switched up between incompatible major scales, you might get the idea.
There are positives, but even they raise questions: Bubbling single "Artificial Intelligence", which is probably the first track on Good Evening with a discernible lyric (even if it's just the title), has a clear-eyed purpose. Meanwhile, "Let's Go (The Two of Us Together)" and "Chimera" follow in the path of "Weak For Me", an earlier highlight that cops its sound from the Jets' "Crush on You". It's debatable whether this DIY take on lite and funky Reagan-era R&B is refreshing or akin to munching on a piece of bubblegum that's been stuck in a pack of Donruss since the mid-80s-- why dull the hooks when the sort of fidelity that could bring them to a focus is more readily available than ever, even to artists at their most entry-level?
But then again, maybe it's not a remix Good Evening needs so much as a fair yardstick to measure it by. Though it's arguable that each has different goals, the same sort of disembodied vocals and languorous textures you hear in acts like Grouper, Beach House, and A Sunny Day In Glasgow are proof there's more to this sort of thing than sounding like a Cocteau Twins record playing two parties over. Alas, Nite Jewel isn't at the level of the aforementioned; with her devotion to a sound at the relative cost of songs, she's more like a shuttle-mate of Salem in the blog-hype space race to find an act that can merge tapes-out-of-the-trunk hip-hop recording methods with 4AD gossamer. Now let's see if they're willing to outsource the engineering.
