The El Paso, Texas-based performance artist and musician stages an exploration of popular romance with an album that’s as gauzy and enveloping as a fragrance ad.
While writing his gorgeous defense of gay marriage in the 2012 the Obergefell v. Hodges decision, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy might have gotten too lost in rhapsodic praise. Without marriage, he proclaimed, same-sex pairs would be “condemned to live in loneliness”; the age-old institution wards off a “universal fear” that you might cry out for company and find no one there. Despite the radical intimacies of spinsters and communal families, those who opt out of legally recognized coupledom are presumed incomplete. Century after century, the ideal of the monogamous pair looms over our cultural imagination: The ancient Greeks believed that Zeus split humans into two, dooming them to roam eternally in search of their other half. The feeling of love may be transcendent, yet our concept of it seems conservative and timid under scrutiny.
Still, there’s something shamefully seductive about the illusion of a singular love—the soft-focus pining and windblown mystery, the bliss of collapsing yourself into someone else. Even its most syrupy manifestations lodge themselves in our memory. In Céline Dion’s breathless “The Power of Love” video, love looks like lounging in bed or smizing in a ridiculously comfy sweater—and who doesn’t want that? On True Romantic, the performance artist, musician, and perfumer René Kladzyk, aka Ziemba, considers how stale archetypes of romance have seeped into her psyche. But the pleasure of big feelings proves irresistible. “I must be a true romantic (or a fool!),” she exclaims on the title track, a song so buoyant and rejuvenated that she might’ve recorded it upon exiting the spa.
True Romantic is as gauzy and enveloping as a fragrance ad. “Feelings Are Real” conjures the chiming, soporific dreamscapes of Enya, like what you’d hear after drinking a potion in an enchanted forest. Ziemba intones the song’s three lines like a spell. From there, she leaps into the sunset heaven of “You Feel Like Paradise,” a moony, glam-rock-inspired song about taking flight into someone else. “Just take a step out of time,” she urges her paramour, advice that doubles as a meta-commentary on her retro sound and grand declarations. In the digital era, we are all semioticians, scrupulously aware of how minor shifts in punctuation can tip speech towards new meanings. Ziemba bypasses all this interpretation, intent on plastering her feelings on billboards. “I will love you until the end of time,” she belts on “Power of Love,” an obvious homage to Dion.
True Romantic is simultaneously a reminder of the allure and the ridiculousness of popular romance. Watch enough power-ballad music videos, and at some point, you’ll hit your capacity for candlelight, linen sheets, and fan-blown hair. Ziemba leans into the absurdity. “Mama” flirts with an archetype one might call “Woman Somberly Playing Solo Piano,” in which musical theatre types like Sara Bareilles confide their most tender feelings while gliding through simple chord progressions. Gaudy wind chimes flutter in the opening, then a pan flute beams in. Oh, come on, you groan delightedly. “Bad Love” poaches twee metaphors from Christmas classics: “A fish can love a turtledove,” Ziemba croons as strings swell in the background. The twirling, 1950s-style pop song could slot into the closing credits of a Meg Ryan comedy. Midway through her version of Ary Barroso’s “Brazil” comes a saxophone passage so cheesy that it could soundtrack a Tommy Wiseau sex scene.
“I regard romantic comedies as a subgenre of sci-fi,” the actress and comedy writer Mindy Kaling once wrote—a world where the governing principles are as foreign as any alien planet’s. Despite Ziemba’s stated intention to process this romantic conditioning, True Romantic is more inclined to frolic in Disney tropes than to prod at their underlying ideology. The most apparent attempt to deflate love’s mythology is found at the outset: “If I’m Being Honest” nods to the destructiveness of constantly chasing beginnings, as well as the irrationality of projecting your hopes onto someone you’ve barely met. Elsewhere, the lyrics devolve into sensory mumbo jumbo: “The word chrysanthemum so warm inside/Suffering sounds divorce voluptuous delight,” Ziemba sings on “Casket and Cradle,” which recalls the sunny pop of the Carpenters. Without more trenchant, sarcastic observations to undercut its dreamy vintage sound, True Romantic can’t offer a truly contemporary spin on romance. The album’s nostalgia and tenderness are enchanting. But floaty, heternormative ideas of love have consequences beyond personal disappointment.
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