Music Review: Orenda Fink, Blue Dream

By Melissa Bratcher

To call Orenda Fink’s Blue Dream meditative isn’t at all a stretch. It’s an exploration of the meaning of love, death, and spirituality, all filtered through a dreamy, gauzy haze and sung in an incredibly intimate way. Listening to Blue Dream is like walking into someone else’s slumber: a place where you’re welcome, but it’s all a bit disorienting and dark and a little eerie. It’s a captivating record.

The production is rich and fascinating. Fink’s voice is breathy and quiet, and her enunciation is startlingly crisp. Her vocals are pushed to the front, yet so soft they’re like she’s telling you a secret. There are layers and layers of synths and jagged guitars and muted cries. It is dreamlike, which was the intended effect. It’s a trip through her dream journal, complete with a theremin.

Blue Dream has one speed and that is languid. The somnambulant title track has layers of vocals, ethereal and bewitching, and guitars that sound like underwater currents. The imagery in “Ace Of Cups” is arresting—“The sea is a kingdom/and you are its queen”—sung with Fink’s unusual voice and delivery (there’s something about her voice that calls to mind Astrud Gilberto, in her tone and enunciation). The harmonies on the chorus of “You Can Be Loved” are sumptuous and rich and painfully lovely. “Holy Holy” is spacey—empty but full. The guitar is expansive and builds nicely on the bridge. Her voice is produced gorgeously here, teased out like a singular instrument.

After the death of her 16-year-old dog, Orenda Fink found herself searching for the meaning of death. That current runs through Blue Dream. “Poor Little Bear” is like an unspeakably sad folk song, an urgent elegy in which she slips into a beautiful higher register. It’s primal and raw, but hushed. The underlying sadness and disconnectedness of “Sweet Disorder” (“I believed in nothing and in the end that’s what I got”) is palpable through her chiming gentle vocals.

Blue Dream haunts. It’s an open, searching record, a stumble through someone else’s subconscious and honest in a way that feels rare.

Blue Dream was released on August 19 through Saddle Creek.

Tour Dates:
09.18 – Denver, CO @ Lost Lake Lounge
09.19 – Salt Lake City, UT @ Kilby Court
09.21 – Spokane, WA @ Big Dipper
09.22 – Seattle, WA @ Barboza
09.23 – Portland, OR @ Doug Fir
09.25 – San Francisco, CA @ Hemlock Tavern
09.26 – San Jose, CA @ Cafe Stritch
09.27 – Los Angeles, CA @ Los Globos
09.29 – San Diego, CA @ The Casbah
09.30 – Tucson, AZ @ The Flycatcher