Nite Jewel: "Want You Back"

With the recent tidal Wavve of Times New Vikings in the previously lo-key lo-fi movement, a little discernment is necessary to separate the good fish from the bad fish. Does the fuzz work as another instrument, or as a self-referential tool? Do you forget about it if you listen long enough, or is it rubbing its abrasive bits in your face like so much sandpaper? Blurry reverb is a good trick if you can find your niche, but if it’s just out of laziness or fuzz for its own sake, go buy some good mics.

LA’s Nite Jewel stands firmly in the former category of A Good Trick; “Female version of Ariel Pink” is the shorthand that would fall into the latter. Jewel’s 2008 Good Evening featured beats and synths that were big and reverb-y with distant, near-ambient vocals evoking the dirty soundtrack of some ’80s European arthouse flick on beat-up VHS. New single “Want You Back” still has the far-gone ’80s vibes, but the funky limberness is more along the lines of current revivalists like Cut Copy, MGMT, or even some Neptunes, using new software to sound classic. The vocals hover towards clarity, a little frustrating in their neither-ambient-nor-hookiness, but over the course of four minutes the snap/claps and synth bassline wear down resistance.

Ultimately, Nite Jewel’s deal is being a groove band in a genre that usually is all about pop nuggets roughened up in extremes, either out of necessity or simply as a gimmick. They make it work with mysterious coos and multi-tracked vocals, emphasizing the alienating aspects of low fidelity (like on first-album standouts like “Let’s Go” or “What Did He Say”) and then letting the seductive beats make all that aloofness super cool. “Want You Back” seems like a half-step forward into different waters: the groove is getting tighter, but do bloghits-of-the-week run by different rules than the fuzzy space lounge of yore? Nite Jewel is on the wild frontier of a weird mini-genre, and I want to hear what’s next.