Real High

Nite Jewel’s fourth album came out on May 5, 2017, on Gloriette, the label Ramona Gonzalez revived after leaving Secretly Canadian and pays for herself. Real High arrived less than a year after Liquid Cool, but its songs were older than that. According to the label’s notes, they were recorded over four years in Los Angeles with Cole M.G.N., and one of the vocals goes back to 2011 or 2012.

A first version was finished around 2014. By Gonzalez’s account, she, Cole M.G.N. and their friend Harley B of the Samps spent sessions on mushrooms changing the beats and adding and removing reverb for hours, without ever working out what the songs wanted. She decided the production was wrong and put the record away until 2016. When she came back to it, she stripped it down to “a few synths and some drum samples” and finished it in a month or two. She kept old material where it worked: the vocal on the title track is a take from 2011 or 2012 that she never redid. She and Cole M.G.N., who was also her husband, produced and mixed it together, and David Ives mastered it.

The songs start from the bass. Her first band instrument was the electric bass, in a group with Cole M.G.N. where she had to sing and play at once, and she has said that taught her to treat the bass line as a counterpoint to the voice. Her models were the synth bass lines of 1990s hip-hop and R&B. Pitchfork described the result as tracks built on a Moog-style bass with keys and drum fills on top, with verses and choruses but few bridges. The other model is Janet Jackson. janet. and Rhythm Nation 1814 were records Gonzalez played over and over as a child, although she says she only noticed “a little bit of Janet in there” once the album was done. The title track borrows a line from Jackson’s 1993 single “That’s the Way Love Goes”.

The guests are old friends. Dâm-Funk, her partner in the Nite Funk project, plays guitar synth on “Had to Let Me Go”. Julia Holter sings background parts on “When I Decide (It’s Alright)”, a song Gonzalez says is about being slow to let in someone you love. Droop-E, the Bay Area rapper and producer and E-40’s son, adds vocals to the closer, “R We Talking Long”. The Los Angeles artist Geneva Jacuzzi directed the dance video for “2 Good 2 Be True”, and the video for the title track lays Cole M.G.N.’s image over shots of Gonzalez walking through the city. A companion 12-inch, Obsession, with alternate mixes and B-sides, came out on Italians Do It Better.

Critics agreed on the craft and split on the polish. Paste gave it 9.2 and heard her pop side out in front for the first time. Pitchfork, at 7.5, called it her most focused work and picked “The Answer” and “I Don’t Know” as the standouts. PopMatters gave it 6 out of 10: it missed the haze of her earlier records and thought much of this one faded into the background. Crossfader did not recommend it and wanted more personality from her voice, though it still liked “I Don’t Know” and “2 Good 2 Be True”.

The polish is the record’s argument, and Gonzalez paid for it with a scrapped version and two years on the shelf. The songs critics kept naming, “I Don’t Know”, “2 Good 2 Be True” and “The Answer”, are the most direct dance tracks here, built the way she describes, from the bass up. What the cleaner sound gives up is the blur of her early records. She said that year that this album was more about the singing, and on a record made to show off the voice, that is a fair trade. The B-sides followed in July as Real Low, and the next Nite Jewel album, No Sun, did not arrive until 2021.