Ziemba is one of those musicians who channels so many artists from the past and present; it’s as if she invented a new genre. Ziemba is Tucson-based René Kladzyk, and her latest album—the first since 2020’s True Romantic—was written and recorded while she worked full-time as a reporter covering the US immigration system and the Department of Defense. The Braid certainly doesn’t sound like it was recorded during spare nights and weekends. The meticulous nature of the performances suggests full-time focus. With Kladzyk on vocals and keyboards, she’s ably assisted by a number of musicians, particularly co-producer and multi-instrumentalist Don Godwin.
It feels impossible to classify The Braid into a single genre—there’s too much going on here, all impeccably delivered—but sophisti-pop seems to be where Kladzyk mostly leans, bringing to mind everything from the Beautiful South to Annie Lennox to Alison Moyet. The single “The Pleasure Seekers” opens the album with a galloping roar of drums, before Kladzyk sings over a piano-heavy groove: “Running like a faucet / Full blast / Letting it wash over me / Recklessly / Recklessly / Feeling it all.” The track has a dramatic exuberance, which Kladzyk described on Instagram as “the sonic version of sprinting through the pouring rain with total abandon, tits out”.
Gears shift with the new wave bop of “We Implode”, evoking both legends like the Pretenders and contemporary indie pop wizards like Flora Hibberd. The songs’ sophistication and the band’s crisp perfection are on full display on tracks like the soaring, pristine pop symphony “Winter of My Heart”, sounding like Aimee Mann fronting the Beatles. Kladzyk also makes room for long-form, singer/songwriter epics like the album’s gleaming centerpiece “The Perfect Rose”, opening with a daunting, dramatic piano intro before Kladzyk enters territory somewhere between Hejira-era Joni Mitchell and the wistful sonic breezes of Fleetwood Mac.
Kladzyk implements classic soul horns and a Burt Bacharach-like atmosphere into the lush “Utopia”, while still pulling off ethereal art rock like the puzzling “All of It”, evoking both the hushed wonder of Laurie Anderson and instrumental progressive rock flourishes straight out of Pink Floyd in the 1970s. This seamless blending of styles only partly accounts for The Braid’s appeal.
The songs themselves possess an uncanny maturity and sophistication, and the attention to detail is almost novelistic. In the luxurious ballad “Boneflute”, she sings “When was it we danced to the boneflute melody? / When was it you lay on the hardwood floor with me? / Boneflute, wood grain, think that if I say the names / I can live forever, but the magic’s making me.”
In the closing track, the gauzy country ballad “The Only Forever”, Kladzyk sings “Change, never not changing,” and that perfectly explains one of the key appeals of this truly magnificent album—every track is an adventure, never boring, never predictable. Ziemba’s Spotify bio says that the music “dances through genres while plumbing the crystalline caverns of the soul”. It’s a line I’d kill to have written, and a very accurate one here.