Charli XCX and Nite Jewel go back to the future

 
The last few years have been a bull market for young women with avant-garde interests exploring the outer orbits of synth-driven dance music. Friday in L.A., two of the best young talents make a case that this trend has no signs of slowing.

Over at Club Nokia Friday and the Bootleg Theater Saturday, the 19-year-old English singer-composer Charli XCX makes her proper live debut in the Southland. She's the latest signing to the local indie IAMSOUND, and it's easy to see why. Charli XCX was raised in London's derelict warehouse party scene. Early singles such as "Nuclear Seasons" and "Stay Away" have a dark, ravey fizz, like a glass of cherry Coke stained with black lipstick. As a vocalist, she has an ear for inhabiting songs with a lovelorn distance that might be a sign of our times.

"When the world's in dark times, amazing pop comes out of it," she said over the phone from a West Hollywood hotel where she was holed up as she finished tracks for her debut album a few weeks ago. "There's going to be a lot fewer songs about just being in the club. There's a backlash to all that ultra-sexualness, and darker artists can be beautiful too."

Nite Jewel, Dntel, others to honor Kraftwerk, 'German cosmic music'

Fans of Krautrock and early German synth music take note: Los Angeles producer-songwriter Nite Jewel will team up with Peanut Butter Wolf, Dntel, Daedalus, Carlos Nino, White Magic and others for a night celebrating the "German cosmic music" of Popol Vuh, Manuel Gottsching and Kraftwerk at the Ford Amphitheatre on June 1, opening the outdoor theater's summer season.

Co-sponsored by the Goethe-Institut and the nonprofit online radio station and DJ collective dublab, the evening, called "Krautrock Classics: A Night of German Cosmic Music," will feature a full performance of "Computer World," Kraftwerk's 1981 masterpiece, by Ramona Gonzales, a.k.a. Nite Jewel. She'll team with Stones Throw Records founder/DJ Peanut Butter Wolf, Nedelle Torissi of Cryptacize and others to play, among others, "Pocket Calculator," "Numbers" and "Home Computer," early synth songs that became templates of a style and foretold the rise of techno.

As well, producer-DJ Nino, co-founder of Build an Ark and a member of the dublab collective, will collaborate with Gaby Hernandez, Dexter Story and others to rework the music of drone rock legends Popol Vuh. And L.A. group the Pharoahs and guests will perform an excerpt from former Ash Ra Temple guitarist Manuel Gottsching's first solo album, "E2-E4."

The evening comes in the wake of last month's performances by Kraftwerk of its recorded works at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, where tickets were snatched up in hours.

Tickets for the cosmic evening are available through the Ford Amphitheatre.

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-- Randall Roberts

twitter.com/@liledit

Photo: Kraftwerk performs during a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City on April 10, 2012. Credit: Mike Coppola/Getty Images.

Album review: Nite Jewel's 'One Second of Love'

Coming up through the Los Angeles experimental music scene, Nite Jewel, a.k.a. Ramona Gonzalez, is a musical scavenger. She's fascinated by certain sounds for both nostalgic and cerebral reasons, and throughout her new album, “One Second of Love,” those two forces duke it out.

Gonzalez kicks off the record by singing, “I'm a broken record; you have heard this before,” which is pretty cheeky coming from an unapologetic retroist. Over the course of 10 minimalist collages, Nite Jewel combines Italian disco, the electro-thump of '90s R&B and '80s radio pop with the froth served frozen. She obsesses over the details, isolating them in synth atmospheres so akin to Muzak that our ears are almost trained to treat them as silence. In her artfully arranged pastiches, those details pop — whether it's the clacking of typewriter keys in “Autograph” or the jarring syncopation in “She's Always Watching You.”

In addition to being a scavenger, Nite Jewel is a bit of a trickster. She employs just enough traditional structure to get her weird songs labeled as pop. It's smart, like everything on “One Second of Love.” But sometimes Nite Jewel's music feels so controlled, you can't help but wonder what would happen if she'd lose her head for not just one second, but one minute or more.

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Critic's Notebook: Nite Jewel, Julia Holter and a new sound of L.A.

— Margaret Wappler

“One Second of Love”
Nite Jewel
Secretly Canadian
Three stars (out of four)

New: Luscious Jackson, Nite Jewel, Ting Tings, Screaming Females

Pop & Hiss takes a look at some of the week's notable new music, in handy, bite-sized form. This week: Luscious Jackson, Nite Jewel, Screaming Females and the Ting Tings.

This post has been corrected. See note at the bottom for details.

• Nite Jewel, the smooth synth project of L.A. musician Ramona Gonzalez, has released a second single from the forthcoming album, “One Second of Love.” “In the Dark” could be the score to a quiet, walking-the-downtown-streets moment in a late '80s movie for single ladies, a less hyperactive “After Hours” but with a female protagonist. From its opening blanket of synths to its few feathery guitar riffs, everything about “In the Dark” is designed to go down easy but not without thought. Gonzalez, her vocals deeply influenced by R&B sirens of the '90s but on the mellow tip, descends into her lower register to stir up the song’s inky liquid center. It’s highly recommended, along with the first single, the more club-popping “One Second of Love.” -- Margaret Wappler

• Though a handful of songs from the Ting Tings' 2008 debut "We Started Nothing" became ubiquitious in commercials and movie teasers, the snappy English pop duo are weirder than they let on. At their most high-spirited, the duo of singer/guitarist/rock 'n' roll cheerleader Katie White and drummer/producer Jules de Martino are a dance-rock equivalent of a cartoon pep rally, slapping together punk guitars, New Wave coldness and brassy vocals. "Soul Killing," the latest peek into the sophomore album "Sounds from Nowheresville," due March 13, shows the band's knack for bridging the familiar and the wacky. The band at first seems to be striking a reggae groove, but the rocking-chair beat and chant of "they will never hold us down" soon starts to feel more like a nod to Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall." Yet the Ting Tings remain all attitude. White sings, raps and chants, and the mix of hand-claps and vibrating rhythms -- the sound of a heavily synthesized vibrating metal sheet -- recalls the jerkiness of the Clash's "This is Radio Clash." -- Todd Martens

Nite Jewel to release debut album on Secretly Canadian in March

This posted has been updated since its original posting.

Recently, the synth-funk stalwart act Nite Jewel announced a big step forward in its career. The L.A. band, masterminded by Ramona Gonzalez, inked a deal with the renowned indie Secretly Canadian for a new album, after releases on respected smaller labels such as Italians Do It Better, Mexican Summer and Gloriette.

Now that forthcoming album, "One Second of Love," has an official release date of March 6. The album's title track, streaming here, finds Gonzalez forgoing a lot of the reverb and delay that typically accompany her voice. It's the most direct and clarified electro-sass track of her career. 

UPDATE: Nite Jewel has also announced a live set for the Mondrian Sessions concert series at the West Hollywood Mondrian Hotel on Dec. 16.

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-- August Brown

Photo by Mathew Scott

 

Nite Jewel signs to Secretly Canadian, releases new single

The perennial L.A. electro-funk project Nite Jewel just got a nice leg up from Bloomington, Ind. The outfit founded by singer-producer Ramona Gonzalez just signed to the Midwest's well-regarded indie Secretly Canadian for a forthcoming album set for early next year, after successful cuts for Mexican Summer, Italians Do It Better and Gloriette.

Live review: Nite Jewel at the Troubadour

The fact that Nite Jewel titled their new e.p. “Am I Real?” seems apt.  This is a band touching on big ideas, but still implacably held by doubt.

Every piece is there for a truly devastating act – Ramona Gonzalez’s lilting voice has a wide reach and a knack for making sadness sound both icy and inviting at once. In her young career, she’s arrived at a fully-realized sound palette of soft-focus synthesizers, and this newest incarnation of her live band sports some high-wire instrumentalists. Her new e.p. is her most fidelity-focused and vigorously produced thing in her catalog and has maybe her best song yet on it.

And yet. At the release party for “Am I Real?” at the Troubadour last night, the band went back and forth between an intriguing sense of remove and just feeling distant and lax. They use obscurity to great effect on record, and like most problems in life, this can probably be solved live with lazers and fog machines.  But they need to figure out how to make their night-driving mood feel more definitely real in person.

The best part of Nite Jewel live is the exacting skill of the rhythm section – Cory Lee plays the record’s slap-bass samples with Bootsy Collins precision, and drummer Gavin Salmon manages to be both completely in pocket while breaking rhythms into tiny, sharp pieces. Gonzalez and her partner in Nite Jewel, Cole M. Grief-Neill,  are virtuoso synth wranglers, and even Julia Holter, the droll female backup singer with few responsibilities other than occasional high harmonies and a charming art-school-robot-dance, adds a certain languid mood to show.