Tiny Mix Tapes 70

Nite Jewel
Liquid Cool

[Gloriette; 2016]

Rating: 3.5/5

Pitchfork 62

As music fans, we're accustomed to reading about epic clashes between artists and major-label record execs. But even musicians on smaller labels can run into grievances. For Nite Jewel’s Ramona Gonzalez, her disillusioning run came not from Sony or Warner Music or any of their many wholly owned subsidiaries, but from the indie hub Secretly Canadian—hardly the kind of greedy corporate fat cats you picture artists duct-tapping their mouths in protest over. As Gonzalez tells it, though, Secretly Canadian pushed her in a pop direction she was never quite comfortable with for Nite Jewel’s 2012 One Second of Love, forcing collaborators on her and pressuring her to cede the very control she built her career around.

“They were making the process feel toxic because they were putting too much pressure on me to create something that, I didn’t really even know what they wanted me to do, because their version of pop is so unusually different than mine,” Gonzalez explained in an interview. “It’s like, how do you come to terms with the fact that you can do something better yourself, and you’re also not giving money or rights to a basically unknown entity of like, Midwestern bros?”

One Second of Love was good enough for what it was, yet it felt like a half-measure—not quite a complete enough embrace of contemporary pop to land her real radio play, but enough of a departure that her songs lost the rough edges and fragile intimacy that gave her early work its intrigue. (It didn’t flatter the album any that it arrived right after Grimes had made a similar transition from hermetic electro to sugary pop on her own terms, without compromising any of her individualistic spirit.) And so on Liquid Cool, Gonzalez effectively declares a mulligan. Recorded at her own pace, on her own property and for her own imprint, the album undoes its predecessor’s makeover and reclaims the murky, DIY vision of Nite Jewel’s Altered Zones-era releases.

If all that makes Liquid Cool sound reactionary, it can be, especially in its guarded opening stretch, which seems designed to weed out anybody hoping for another fix of One Second’s breezy, R&B melodies. The album’s vaporous opening tracks are almost pointedly light on hooks, but there are rewards for listeners who stick it out. A bittersweet portrait of digital infatuation, “Kiss the Screen” plays like a demo of a would-be hit, and even with its modest production it’s catchier than anything on One Second. Gonzalez delivers it with the enthusiasm of a John Hughes character singing Madonna into a hairbrush.

Nothing else on the record is nearly so personable, but the frolicsome “Over the Weekend” and swooning, house-informed “Boo Hoo” are similarly light on their feet. For an album that begins in such a defensive posture, it ultimately goes down easy. The sequencing gives it a nice little arc, too: it opens hesitantly, but gradually warms up and comes out of its shell before returning to seclusion on the wistful closer “All My Life.”

Liquid Cool’s backstory makes it hard not to root for the album. How inspiring would it be if, newly emancipated from her overbearing label, Gonzalez went on to record her Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, a triumph that proves how musicians are better when left to chase their own muses? Gonzalez never sets her sights that high, though. Instead, Liquid Cool is just another likable if unexceptional lo-fi electro-pop record. But it’s hers, and that counts for something.

Drowned In Sound 60

Nite Jewel’s Ramona Gonzalez has had four years to test out the theory. The outcome? A partial rejection of the road more taken.

Having been influenced into a more overtly pop-centric sound on 2012’s One Second to Love, Gonzalez has been open in expressing her discomfort, describing Secretly Canadian’s input as 'toxic'. The result was something of a compromised second set, with glints of brilliance not fully uncovered, presumably because of a lack of faith in their potential.

Rather than frustratingly charge off through the bushes though, to find her path again on Liquid Cool, she’s tracked back to where she left off in her earlier work: lo-fi dreamy, synth-pop.

There is of course plenty of ‘this sort of thing’ - pop impulses with deeper, darker imaginations - with near every possible shade of the spectrum mapped out by the scattered progeny of Kate Bush, Sade and the Cocteau Twins.

To whit, with the stated goal of exploring 'the theme of aloneness in a crowded and disconnected world', the blur and chiaroscuro of Liquid Cool’s cover art is pretty much dead on.

It’s down to the songs then not to let the side down.

Lead single ‘Kissing the Screen’ is a brisk slab of pulsating Eighties pop, whose production is at is most crystal clear even as the song itself represents the peak of the record’s ifs, buts and maybes in its chorus (“How will I ever know? And how will I ever show?”). By taking those familiar tropes and twisting them on their head, its also the most brazen take on the album’s theme, providing a neat twist on pop song conventions by placing the object of unrequited adorations behind the blue glow of a smartphone. It’s a bit like the ‘Take on Me’ video for the print is dead generation.

‘Boo Hoo’ does a pretty similar trick with its early Noughties R&B inflections but doesn’t have quite the same impact, though the Europop-sounding delivery of the chorus (more like “Ba Heu”) helps the track zip by pleasantly enough.

Liquid Cool is at its best and most interesting, though, when Gonzalez’s sound plays with the way our brains and human interactions have been rewired in the modern age, raising the bar by creating impactful moments via osmosis.

‘Was That A Sign’ sparkles and crunches, its synths almost clumsy in their alternative jaunty and ghostly. Its in the clash of the two moods though that the purpose hits home: to mirror the sensations of reading and misreading intrapersonal relationships that the song centres on, heightened by the increased level of stimuli we’re faced with in making those relationships work.

‘You Now’ though, is the case in point. Carried by an oddly out-of-body momentum, its vocals obscure and ethereal, its drums woolly and muddling even as the bassline drives us forward. The effect is of a hazy journey across a nightclub floor, of senses obscured by light, smoke and sound.

Punctuating the track though is a siren of sorts, halfway between a notification blip and that kind of irritatingly amazing aural meme being deployed by Diplo and co… you know, the novelty riffs and samples that have driven Biebaissance.

First joining in the post-chorus and then dropping out at random throughout, it feels deliberately distracting, even irritating rather than catchy, reminding us – as these things do – of reality, just as we’re about to lose ourselves.

If it’s this kind of sophisticated song-writing Gonzalez feared was being quashed by a course being set for poppier climes, then it’s all the better that she’s forcibly retaken control of her own destiny. They’re worth it.

The hope moving forward is that they can make an appearance more often, because though these tracks succeed, they currently err on the few and far between. Elsewhere, ‘Over the Weekend’ has a glossy airlessness for all the work of its bouncy hi-hat dominated beat, ‘I Mean It’ kind of sounds like it doesn’t and ‘All My Life’ starts to feel like it’s taking exactly that long, and then opts out to cut out rather than doing anything with it.

So that’s the job then next time around. Disrupt the seas of somnambulance that currently lie between these peaks of inspiration. In short: up the dosage of killer and we’re onto a winner.

The Guardian 40

(Gloriette)

Faced with writer’s block, and following a dispute with her record label, Ramona Gonzalez recorded this album in a closet. Two closets, to be exact, in two different parts of LA, where Gonzalez has crafted Nite Jewel’s glassy, minimal synth pop style over the course of the past decade. The details might be apocryphal, but they feel true, such is the hermetic feel of the work. Part of what makes Liquid Cool feel distinct (it’s also the name Gonzalez applies to her music) is the fact that the synth pop style Gonzalez pioneered in the late 00s has had its moment. Polished up on the Drive soundtrack, it was then filleted by other artists such as Grimes, and is now largely silent again. So, if what Nite Jewel offers here sounds doubly retro, it is sincerely meant. Programmed rhythms and simple synth progressions are paired with Gonzalez’s languorous vocals. Kiss the Screen, Over the Weekend and Boo Hoo are catchy and uptempo, but remain sketches of uncertainty, of imagined love. There’s a sense of truth being deliberately obscured – left in the closet, perhaps.