Good Evening

Occupying the twilit space between Ariel Pink's lo-fi avant pop and the codeine beats of Chromatics, Nite Jewel's debut album, Good Evening, brought a glorious new slant to the golden age of disco and became an after-hours go to from the record shelf. Recorded when Ramona Gonzalez was still a college student, Good Evening was originally released on Gloriette Records in 2008. The album is dance music on an intimate scale, drawing inspiration from Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam and Arthur Russell, filtered through a lo-fi recording process.

Like Chromatics and Junior Boys, Nite Jewel makes dance music more suitable for the ride home from the club than the actual disco.

The home recording project of an L.A.-based multimedia artist/philosophy student who wields an eight-track cassette recorder and cites freestyle divas Lisa Lisa and Debbie Deb as among her primary influences, Nite Jewel's effectively self-released debut album holds the potential to be many things, few of them particularly promising: dryly intellectual, artily indulgent, self-consciously ironic, vapidly modish, unlistenably amateurish.