Ziemba - Hope is Never album review: dream pop and alt-folk artfully overlap

Brooklyn-based performance artist/songwriter René Kladzyk is cut from the same material as other enthralling musical experimentalists such as Tune-Yard’s Merrill Garbus – there are harmonics and sonic layers on Kladzyk’s debut album that take some time to negotiate but when you finally end up at the destination she has directed you towards, you simply have to sit back and take it in – or even better, get lost.

There are hints of Patti Smith’s mesmeric vocal performances, also, as well as a sense that Kladzyk views her music as a form of mysteriously channelled therapy.

Whatever way you look at it, her lo-fi songs – including It Curls Itself, Set me as a Seal, Rapture, With the Fire – artfully overlap dream pop and alt-folk in a wistful, fully realised way.

[ theziemba.com ]