Ziemba

The holiday season is a horrible time to be grieving. Family gatherings and omnipresent nostalgia can amplify a loved one’s absence, becoming constant reminders of what is lost. René Kladzyk -- the songwriter, producer, vocalist and pianist behind Ziemba -- is acutely aware of that feeling. After Kladzyk’s father suffered a stroke in December 2019 and died on January 2, 2020, Christmas associations were radically and permanently transformed. Ziemba’s new full length album, Unsubtle Magic, navigates the holiday season through the lens of grief; journeying “a year and a day” from the initial loss through the following Christmas, a grim anniversary.

“Time doesn’t freeze just cuz you want it to,” Kladzyk sings on the album’s third to last track, a soaring winter anthem that doubles as a childlike tantrum, lamenting the irrefutable nature of change. “I don’t surrender to this life!” belts Kladzyk while an insistent chorus counters “all you love you’ll lose.” The music gets bigger and bigger, featuring a horn section carving out subterranean tunnels of sound, and then poof! It’s all gone. Only the piano remains with a stubbornly melancholic refrain.

Kladzyk’s piano sits at the beating center of the musically eclectic album, bearing influences ranging from zany New Wave to baroque pop to 1970s art rock. “It was my dad’s piano, and was in my childhood home growing up-- the first piano I ever played on,” said Kladzyk, describing the process of recording the upright Steinway at her home in El Paso, Texas, with her vocal mic carefully propped above the belly of the piano. Much of the album, like the piano itself, carries traces of the musical legacy of Kladzyk’s father, including a cover of one of his songs: Set in Ice, penned in December 1974 while he worked as a touring musician under the moniker Aurel Roy. “My dad quit playing music when my mom got pregnant with my older sister, and he really didn’t talk about that chapter of his life much. But it brought him so much joy when I began pursuing music in earnest,” Kladzyk said. “He was my biggest fan and most trusted advisor, the person I shared demos with for honest, sometimes brutal feedback.”

Kladzyk’s dad was “really into Christmas -- he thoroughly inhabited Santaness,” and cultivated a deep love of the holidays and holiday music in Kladzyk, who has released annual Christmas mixes for the past decade, and made a winter solstice EP in 2015. “A lot of my earliest singing memories are singing Christmas carols with my sister year-round when we were little kids — something that would have been pure torture for anyone other than my Dad. So Christmas music has always occupied a big part of my musical consciousness,” Kladzyk said. “And as an adult I’ve always been the person making the campaign for Christmas music.” But although much of Unsubtle Magic takes place in a Christmas-tinged world, the album focuses more on the evolution of grief than it does on the ‘most wonderful time of the year.’

While early songs of Unsubtle Magic are marked with vivid descriptions of the immediate aftermath of Kladzyk’s dad’s death (Gushing Water, Only Lonely Christmas), later songs grapple with depression and the destabilizing nature of losing a parent (Fear, A Nightmare). In what Kladzyk called an “almost chronological” album sequence, Unsubtle Magic closes with a return to the holiday season via a campy, post-punk rendition of I’ll Be Home for Christmas, and the existential solitude of winter in the album’s title track. Kladzyk’s writing is immediate and cutting, with musical arrangements that emphasize the volatile emotional minefield of a great loss. Will You Haunt Me pairs tensely staccato synths and lilting vocals with a description of the realization of her father’s imminent death. “Oh holy night oh living hell,” she sings, narrating a panicked inner monologue at the hospital.

In “unfortunate pandemic style,” this is the first Ziemba album where Kladzyk never stepped foot in a recording studio: all vocals, synths and piano were recorded at her house in El Paso. Full band tracking happened remotely, with Kladzyk virtually attending sessions. At one point there was concurrent album tracking in three states. Players include many past Ziemba collaborators: Don Godwin (of Too Free, Clear Channel, Gauche, Beauty Pill, Zlatne Uste) who mixed the 2020 Ziemba album True Romantic was “the hero” of Unsubtle Magic. He played drums, bass, full horn sections, ample sleigh bells, and mixed and co-produced the record. Jay Heiselmann (of Grooms, Roya) contributed guitars; he plays in Kladzyk’s country band Rhinestone and co-produced part of the 2019 Ziemba album ARDIS. Chris Gaskell, who also played on True Romantic, played bass, and longtime collaborator Elizabeth LoPiccolo played flute. Megan Gould (of David Byrne, Philip Glass, Giannis Markopoulos, Lou Reed) and Liam O’Brien (of Lizzie No) contributed strings. “Even though it’s a full band record, it’s also a very solitary record,” said Kladzyk, explaining how most of the songs were born out of a year of living alone in the extra-isolating circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Kladzyk, who works as a journalist at an El Paso news outlet, spent much of the past year reporting on the tremendous death toll caused by COVID-19. The scale of human loss in recent years weighs heavily on the record and shaped Kladzyk’s intentions for making it. “I used to think that I only wanted to make music that was uplifting or that had fundamentally positive messages that I was espousing. I don’t really feel that way anymore,” she said. “There have been times when I've been so overcome with sadness. I’ve really needed music that could commiserate with me and tell me that I’m not alone in those feelings. And so that’s what I’m trying to do with this -- offer these songs up for other people who need someone to commiserate with them in their pain.”

But like much of Kladzyk’s discography, Unsubtle Magic is fundamentally hopeful. “Scared for holidays and the way the present colors the past / I hope someday to love Christmas and believe in magic again,” Kladzyk sings wistfully on the track Sandia Crest, recounting a starlit walk spent scattering her aunt’s ashes. The songs became their own medicine, a “Christmas music immersion therapy” for Kladzyk to reframe the anniversary the next time it comes around.

“I remember at one point driving back to the hospital when my Dad was there-- he was still alive but we knew he was going to die -- and I remember hearing a Christmas song on the radio and it triggering this cascade of painful feelings: like nothing would ever be good again, I would never be the same person again, this giant piece of my heart and my childhood and who I was, was now lost forever. And some of that’s true. But I remember feeling like, ‘Oh I don’t want this to be the case and Dad wouldn’t want this to be the case.’ So a lot of these songs stem from the desire to come to terms with this new world without my Dad, to still be able to celebrate and experience joy without him.”