No Sun
By Nite Jewel
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Track listing
Show track credits
- 1 Anymore 6:47
- 2 Before I Go 3:32
- 3 Show Me What You're Made Of 4:17
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percussion
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synthesizer
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- 4 To Feel It 3:19
- 5 #14 3:17
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saxophone
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analog synthesizer
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- 6 No Escape 4:23
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percussion
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- 7 This Time 4:30
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Corey Lee Granetguitar
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- 8 When There Is No Sun 5:50
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writer
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- Total length: 35:55
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3 Reviews
Soulful but spare, a bit too spare and in the shadows to be truly illuminating but she sings with a nocturnal and melancholic sensuality that reminds one of hot summer nights and dark lit clubs. The album sounds cool.
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This is the first Ramona Gonzalez project I’ve ever sat through, and since this is RYM, this admission makes me about as unqualified to review this album as a West Side Story cast member would be when joining the Crips. But like West Side Story, having nothing interesting to say and nothing of value to contribute never stopped me (just kidding, I think Bernstein was a genius, and “Somewhere” is the best non-satanic use of the tritone ever waxed). Onward I press. The byline on No Sun is that Ramona Gonzalez, the titular Jewel, is coming off of a traumatic divorce, and finding herself in a distinctly stygian period of her life, dashes off 35 minutes of slightly jazzy (if the whispers of vibraphone and the entirety of “#14” are anything to go on), but still austere and distanced electronic pop. And as far as “electronic pop” goes, this isn’t the nymphoid uncanny valley saccharose blitz of Grimes (sorry for the 12-car pileup of adjectives, but I just can’t resist vomiting in circles when writing about Grimes), or the sacrosanct Ephrata cloister of Lingua Ignota, or even the off-kilter joys of Caroline Polachek. And now I’ve fallen into the RYM trap of rattling off female artists while completely ignoring the content produced by the artist I’m supposed to be reviewing. Call it the the “Bush/Bjork bacillus.” But to be honest, No Sun doesn’t give me too much to say. It’s not that it’s a particularly bad record. It’s more spare than pretty much any other electronic pop record I’ve ever heard. While Ramona doesn’t exactly have a singing voice that I could pick out of a police lineup, she does know how to pull out the odd vocal curlicue that can prick my ears in a congenial way. “No Escape” sounds like Ramona’s sitting in an apartment that has been stripped bare except of a few bare necessities. And the way that she lifts her voice up at the end of each line in an indirectly questioning way (“thought IT’D cuRE the paNIC”) shows that she’s got more of a grasp on vocal technique than many other singers might when making a record as spare as this. Other spare, metronomic instrumental parts, like the squelchy bass in “To Feel It,” work quite well, especially when Ramona starts to play the bassline off of some squinting noir vibes and synth stabs that flesh the melody out surprisingly well for merely playing framework chords. “#14” is about as good as anything on the record, a instrumental bit of smoked-out lounge languor straight off of a Barry Adamson record. Heck, it might even be my favorite track on the record. It does gets in, its noir thing, and gets out, and though I can acknowledge Ramona’s talent in arranging such spare pieces of music, it dawned on me that I didn’t really feel her vocal absence on “#14.” It’s an elegant record, but for such an intimate document of one of the lowest points of a woman’s life, I feel surprisingly little interiority.
Published
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1
Anymore
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2
Before I Go
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3
Show Me What You're Made Of
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4
To Feel It
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5
#14
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6
No Escape
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7
This Time
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8
When There Is No Sun
Wading through the wreckage of a dissolved 12-year marriage, Ramona Gonzalez reconfigures her Nite Jewel electronic project as a river to observe her shattered identity. So far, nothing this year has been this soothing or gone this far in conferring the distress in its sound alone. No Sun is not a breakup album, it's an album that surveys the devastation that comes with losing a fundamental part of your being.
No Sun is not a breakup album. To call it one is a disservice to everything Ramona Gonzalez is doing. In art, context is everything, and for Nite Jewel's latest album, that's truer than ever. No Sun comes after the dissolution of Gonzalez from her 12-year marriage to Cole M.G.N. in 2018, who helped Gonzalez materialize some of her earliest ideas onto eight-track tapes. In the wake of the unrelentingly painful split, she swam from friend's couch to friend's couch, eventually landing at UCLA to begin her degree in musicology. No Sun, then, is her biggest accomplishment in years, compressing twelve years worth of devotion into just 35 minutes, just four years after being swept away from the island she built with Cole.
Oscillating between arresting arrays of Kraftwerk's chilly synth work and sunkissed ambient pop, No Sun is Gonzalez' most visceral sounding release to date. Despite the emptiness within these compositions, she gracefully toes the line between the blissful and the meditative. Her stunning, seven-minute album opener Anymore is Gonzalez at her most plaintive, trying to console one side of her who will never recover from the loss while reluctantly embracing the solitary road ahead. She plays the role of a professional mourner, one who has had enough time to rummage through the catastrophic toppling of her strongest emotional pillar, able to find something internal as a sturdy replacement for the time being. Similarly, the rippling To Feel It almost has Gonzalez playing coy with herself, noticing how the smallest things: waking up, picking up a pen, working alone, all remind her of her marriage even years after. As chamber-style mallet percussion wrestles with sharp pokey synth tones, her cocoon of warmth is tempted by anger. Ever so slightly, she gives in.
Compared to her glittery chillwave beginnings, No Sun's forays into jazz, soul, and ambient music reminds listeners how long Gonzalez has been making music. #14 sounds as if you took the insular, atmospheric modal jazz masterpieces of the 60s and sent them to an alien race, fuzzy whirring noise and droplets of melancholy strings come to reveal a saxophone bursting with life, gleaming in its higher range before wilting down as soft and low as Gonzalez can convince it. Soft pianos give a pristine, unmuddied beam of light when the sun is just at the right angle, suggesting these feelings of listlessness instead of outright stating them. No Escape welcomes multiple rhythms all at once, a hurried synth pulse weaves its way around clipped and cluttered drum loops that never find their footing. In the emotional state No Sun is in, No Escape forms as a sympathetic allowance to lose yourself in a pool of tears. When There Is No Sun, the album's finale, is the only moment where Gonzalez allows her music to physically balloon, every element found on previous songs congealing into a honey-thick mixture of natural and digital instrumentation. On a musical basis alone, the song is beautiful. As a final grieving moment, it becomes one of the most magical moments of any album this year.
While all this flowery instrumentation and imaginative invocations of loss throughout No Sun is what makes it feel so singular, her plainness at points is really where you'll feel her pain in full. "You hesitate to touch the water, but I'm swimming out," Gonzalez whispers over the light strings and wandering piano arrangement on Before I Go. Later on, she comes to a breaking point where nothing will ever replace the hole left in her heart. "Though I'd cured the panic," she laments on No Escape. Her attempts to save the relationship fail as the avalanche of discordance falls upon her marriage ("Dreaming of waves crashing over us / Put up my hands to control it.") These lines hit like a studded boot to the stomach, forcing you to swallow the same situations she did without anything extra to help it go down.
This Time, one of the album's most stunning pieces of balladry without overdramatizing itself, interpolates the melodic ideas of heartbreaking album opener Anything, proverbially closing the gap and making a full circle back to where No Sun began. Even using some of the same synthesizers, both songs stand on their own as self-assured electronic jewels. "And I can't control / How you treat me now / Will you stand there and watch me drown?" she asks her ex-lover, knowing she may never get the answer. And so, she moves on. Her voice leaves the mix, replaced with a royal electric guitar solo that is the opening door to her next chapter. It's enrapturing, a texture we haven't found in her work up until now, but she doesn't let it take over. It's not a grand moment of self-realization where the past twelve years are forgotten. It fades, just as every other memory has on No Sun. We will likely never see this incarnation of Ramona Gonzalez again, but we don't need to. And now that the times have passed, she doesn't need to, either.
Key tracks: Anymore, #14, When There Is No Sun
Fave tracks: Anymore, Before I Go, Show Me What You're Made Of, To Feel It, #14, No Escape, This Time, When There Is No Sun
Least fave tracks: ...
Fave tracks: Anymore, Before I Go, Show Me What You're Made Of, To Feel It, #14, No Escape, This Time, When There Is No Sun
Least fave tracks: ...
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