You can spend every day consuming songs and films and books about love and you still won’t be ready when its incomparable transformation arrives. The UK-based act Romance know how to bottle such ineffable feelings and channel them via ambience—think of their mood-elevating atmospheres as audible incense or, more pointedly, a reminder of the way love makes the day-to-day feel more magical. Without any disclosure of Romance’s identity (or identities—the number of members is unclear), their music centers on pure emotion. Every track becomes an altar to their namesake, invoking love’s defining qualities and magnetic pull, even its ability to leave you a tragic mess.
With their third album, Once Upon a Time, Romance root their gentle synths in something more concrete: Céline Dion. The Canadian diva is the perfect fount of inspiration for the project: Her monumental yet direct singing makes such emotions feel both attainable and like the stuff of legend—she’s sung of love as life-changing and a source of miracles, but also as something found on someone’s lips. When The New Rolling Stone Album Guide gave Dion’s albums a string of one-star ratings, the accompanying text offered a concession: She was emblematic of a certain kind of pop star, one who believes “bigger is better, too much is never enough, and the riper the emotion the more true.” Her words shoot straight from the heart and into your own.
Self-serious aesthetes may find Dion’s lyrics overly simple, but the title track that opens this album disrupts that perspective. Diaphanous synths set the scene, and then a voice emerges from the mist: “Have you ever been in love?” These words, which come from a 2002 Dion song, are isolated and only occasionally repeated, allowing ample time for rumination. So much sample-based music revels in the mutation of its source material—from Christian Marclay’s turntable experiments to John Oswald’s plunderphonics, DJ Screw’s chopped-and-screwed remixes to Daniel Lopatin’s eccojams—and any skips or collaging presents the results as entirely new creations. Romance’s music has a different effect: Their work points back to Dion, signaling her power ballads’ strengths, which are often hidden in plain sight. When Romance add another sample—“Have you ever walked on air?”—they’re drawing a line between these two questions to declare love a supernatural force. When they throw in another line—“When you find it, don’t let go”—any romantic losses one has previously endured feels all the more incalculable.
Romance transmit such messy, complex emotions in simple, affecting ways. On “Somewhere in the Silence,” a line from Dion’s “Tell Him” is looped: “Never let him go.” The first word is initially truncated, but the rest of the line—let him go—is bellowed. In the original song, Barbra Streisand tells Dion to fight for love, but here any uplift becomes anxiety. The reversed loops heighten the nervousness; it’s as if Dion were replaying different scenarios in her head, paralyzed by a relationship’s uncertain future. “Just a Moment” is even more evocative: The titular line from 2002’s “A New Day Has Come” arrives like a holy decree, echoing the unbridled joy Dion feels upon finding a lover. But “Just a Moment” takes its title from “I Will Be Stronger,” a track from nearly two decades later about surviving a loss. In Romance’s hands, “a new day has come” is a polysemic phrase: love from another and love of self are both crucial to moving forward.
For all the excitement in dissecting Romance’s samples, Once Upon a Time devotes its second half to more straightforward ambience. “Remember” is all ice-cold synths and wispy vocals, while “Crying Is the Only Thing That Gets Me Through” invokes cinematic drama with sustained strings. “I’ve Been Blown by the Wind” proves the star of this three-track run, with vocals on the precipice of coherency: The mere suggestion of a moving lyric is enough to summon bliss. Once Upon a Time lets you peer into all that love can do, encasing fairy-tale experiences and heart-stirring emotions in amber. Romance help you crave love as much as relive it, knowing full well—with help from Céline Dion—that such feelings can last a lifetime.
