Who says hipster's don't dance?
Crowd chat - it's not everyone's thing. It's 9.30pm at XOYO in Shoreditch and warm-up Nicholas Krgovich is wrapping up a mid-set number, the lone keyboardist silhouetted against a smoky wash of shifting blues and greens. The moment hangs uncertainly: his mouth opens and shuts, muted by a silent nod, and then swiftly in to the next R&B Hammond-lead refrain we go. Between his pitch-perfect voice and finger-click percussion, there is nothing bad about this set of heart-bruised ballads, but the slow-building crowd seems restless and tuned out, as if handling a Trey Lorenz appearance at a 4AD showcase.
Crowd chat’s not the headliner's thing either. There is nothing to say and simply a show to get on with as Californian Ramona Gonzalez, A.K.A Nite Jewel, takes the stage and gets straight to work on the last night of her UK tour, opening into a slow-dance duet with Krgovich, now on backing duties. It's a tad limp, but Gonzalez and band cruise hastily into action with the next song, bringing the show up near-immeasurably with a crash of pure '80s synths, pounding kick drums and a bassline just dripping in funk.
As if fresh from a warm-up routine backstage, Nite Jewel are straight on the meter and in full swing. The festivities are notched up further with the next tune, a robotic dream-groove which most certainly does not need more cowbell, and as it ramps to the chorus, any memories of the underwhelming last hour are trampled under the sea of dance shapes I last saw people throwing when I’d first got my little head around long division.
What becomes quickly apparent is the keen attention to musical arrangements here; motifs and modulations are piled sturdily on rock solid foundations of bass and drums, all elements conversing like old friends, everything landing in step. Nite Jewel have achieved that level of structuring which probably took many a laboured hour in the studio to perfect but which come across with bish-bash-bosh efficiency.
Stylistically, we are firmly in the late '80s here, staggeringly so, occasionally to the point where we find only the barest of contemporary influence to hold on to. I can almost feel pastel coloured squares and triangles jittering through my veins. The distinct touches of originality that pack out Gonzalez’s recorded material arrive a little more subtly in the live format, and as the set blazes on it’s clear that the avant garde, ambient haze-outs that mark out much of Nite Jewel territory have been culled from the set list. And why not, because a mean synthbass just made a date with a killer 909 hook and these hipsters are dancing hard, and when the cavernously reverbed vocals hit, it all sounds like the house party next door suddenly became the place to be.
The rest of the set ebbs and flows through a carefully crafted dynamic which swings from dreambeat funk-outs to shuffled stomps, and Ramona’s stage presence does indeed shine like a jewel in the dark. The vocals are timeless in tone and delivery, and when combined with the gently psychedelic pitch shifting synths form a picture that would look something like Kate Bush as rendered by artist Leif Podhajsky.
As the show winds up with a saw-waves-blazing version of ‘We Want Our Things’ we finally get some chat from our hostess, with a smidgen of Californian charm thrown in—“This country is, like, crazy, like!”—and there’s no doubt that we are dealing with a confident artist who’s prepared to take this show to the top. And it’s all there: the digestible arrangements, the winning vocal flare, the radio timing.
I wonder at points if Nite Jewel could benefit from contemporizing the live sound a tad, as exercised beautifully by acts like Beach House and Grimes, but all the same I won’t be much surprised if I spot her playing amongst their ranks one day.
Nite Jewel's second album 'One Second of Love' is out now on Secretly Canadian. To check out what's coming up at XOYO, click here.
www.upsettherhythm.co.uk
Words: Alex Memory
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