Over the past few years, LA’ s Nite Jewel has honed its pop-funk craft across releases from Italians Do It Better, Mexican Summer and LA’s own Gloriette Records.
In that time, Ramona Gonzalez’s airy but often distant voice has found new gravitas and charisma. Meanwhile, the synth lines have gotten more agile and the bass pops tighter and tighter.
The stuttered 80s synth R&B melodies unfold into one another here in ways both giddy and deceivingly nonchalant. This maturation and evolution will all come to a head in early 2012 when Secretly Canadian released Nite Jewel’s proper full-length follow up to her brilliant 2008 LP, Good Evening.
Nite Jewel | We Want Our Things
httpv://https://youtube.com/watch?v=3ciyXACy5lg
Despite the sublimely wrathful cover with the surging of a massive dust wall towards the camera, Lucretia Dalt’s album Commotus, whose title is a Latin word meaning ‘woken’, ‘agitated’ or ‘disturbed’, is an intimate, inward-looking and restrained album.
Its creaking hallways echo with bathroom-tile and kitchen-sink effects emanating from occupied rooms, their peeling doors left ajar, revealing flashes of mirrors and wrought-iron bedposts within. If this album is apocalyptic, it’s the whispering stairwell in the apartment building housing the reluctant post-nuclear cannibals of Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro’s film Delicatessen – introverted, insulated from the yellowing air outside.
Lucretia Dalt | Extraña Colección
httpv://https://youtube.com/watch?v=zKs-1p-8DRY
Apart from two guest appearances, from Luke Sutherland and Julia Holter, Dalt spins everything out herself: soft singing, the lumbering drumkit, the drawling guitar, the alienated drum machine, an arsenal of effects that distance and estrange, and the bass.
“I wanted to be able to use the bass as the main source of sound, expanding the register – even though it’s an instrument with a very limited register – through processing.” The processing unit that became “the essence of the record” was Dalt’s Moogerfooger, an analogue effects pedal whose more outrageous sonic consequences establish the album’s link with the experimental pop of the late 1970s and early 80s.
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Nite Jewel & Lucretia Dalt LIVE
Dj: Gudrun Gut
Tuesday, 07 August 2012 | 20:00 CET
Kantine am Berghain | Am Wriezener Bahnhof | 10243 Berlin/Friedrichshain
nitejewel.com | lucreciadalt.com | berghain.de
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