Dressed all in black, standing behind a black synthesiser against a black backdrop, her face framed by a severe black bob, Ramona Gonzalez AKA Nite Jewel has a hard time standing out tonight. And there may lie the rub with her music, too. Having established a reputation for making faintly avant garde, echo-bathed, lo-fi electro-disco shrouded in drones and tape hiss, with her third album Liquid Cool she drifts into the landscape of drowsy 80s synthpop revisionism already widely explored by Grimes, Twin Shadow, Chromatics, Shura and others.
In an alternate reality Nite Jewel, like all of the above, would be dropping massive multi-million-selling bangers. One new song, Boo Hoo, sounds like Janet Jackson on valium. Another called Running Out of Time is a vapour trail Italo-disco slow-burner of such indisputable beauty that, drained of reverb and toughened up some, it wouldn’t be impossible to imagine Taylor Swift or Katy Perry carrying it up the pop charts.
In truth, LA-based Gonzalez struggles to half-fill a medium-size basement venue. It takes her a while to warm up across this slightly shapeless set, and there’s little to the spectacle besides two business-like male backing musicians – one on synths, the other tapping drum pads. Yet when she gets going and her icily pretty voice thaws, she’s an enchanting presence, pitched somewhere between Grimes’ off-kilter melodicism and Chromatics’ disgustingly cool dreamy shimmer.
She closes with early EP track Another Horizon, proof that ear-candy hooks have always been present in Gonzalez’s music, coyly buried behind wilfully naive-sounding surface dynamics. She could just do with being bolder and brighter in the presentation.
