The Adventures of Voodoo Girl in Dixieland: Orenda Fink's Invisible Ones
Written: Sep 07 '05
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Atmospheric, haunting, and concretely beautiful.
Cons: May induce diarrhea of the metaphor in the listener.
The Bottom Line: In which the author gets the willies, big time.
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| plorentz's Full Review: Invisible Ones [ECD] - Orenda Fink |
It all starts with a suicide. She goes to an abandoned bridge under cover of night, and then...
Something sort of disturbing happened to singer-songwriter Orenda Fink, half of the chilly-voiced indie-pop duo Azure Ray. She fell in love. She got married. She got happy. Her once broken heart had mended. And suddenly she found herself at a loss to write the kind of lost love songs Azure Ray had built their brand around. So she went solo. For now, at least, she sought inspiration elsewhere. In tabloid-worthy outsiders, like that girl who's been in a coma for 25 years, who has the power of healing. Or on the streets of Haiti, in voodoo culture. Or just on the streets of her native Georgia, in Southern hearsay and legend.
Where Azure Ray's songs were internalized - often excruciatingly so - Orenda Fink gazes up from her navel for her first solo album, Invisible Ones, not just looking outward, but looking outside, finding the stories on the fringes, and beyond the fringes. And what she finds there is challenging and lovely, often frightening, but just as often...
statues cry, walls bleed
the desperate ones line up each day
hoping she will take the pain away
one touch of her hand
Miraculous.
These songs creep around us like a thick, deep green ivy over antebellum facades and columns, growing out of the memories of the old buildings, the taken-for-granted objects of every day life; the stories told by fresh cotton sheets, long abandoned plantation fields, the wooden railings of a bridge down by the mill, broken dishes. They hang in the air like Spanish moss over cemeteries, absorbing their sounds - the breezy, haunted sighs that close "Easter Island", the funereal Creole harmonies of "Animal" and "Les Invisibles", the tribal drums that seem to be coming from a thousand miles away, echoed and amplified over the oceans and delivered by the winds - from the moist, death-infused earth, from the...
Easter Island
the demons they hover
your father, your mother
the things they did to you
She believes these stories; she believes in their mysteries and she sings from that belief. Why couldn't the girl in the coma really be a "Miracle Worker?" What if the walls really do bleed? Fink explores these shadows with a journalist's curiosity and pilgrim's reverence, and she delivers them back to us in vivid, saturated colors. The opening verse of the title track tiptoes out of our speakers in a little girl's nightgown, over a piano figure that clenches and releases like an antiquated wooden floorboard, as if it were sneaking out of the house, into the woods to find whatever might be out there, well aware of the danger, but somehow as fearless as...
five, six, seven, eight
invisible ones guard the gate
A suicide.
At times the whole thing can be terribly quiet, at times barely perceptible - the gently tapped out voodoo beats of "Les Invisibles", the tiny guitar pickings that move through the song like insects digging through the soil, and oceans of fallen, rust-orange pine needles. Elsewhere, it's as loud and fierce as an exorcism. "Dirty South" dances a furious ring around a towering bonfire of churchy organ, frantic bass pulses, layered, interlocked voices spinning smoke patterns, echoing the dance in the dark air and dissipating to...
where are the ones who lived before?
they are the cold winds in the north
where are the ones who teach us how?
in sweet magnolias in the south
Invisible.
A night journey through a bayou, where even the trees seem to stalk and churn like nocturnal hunters. It's the kind of thing that can make your solitude feel as tangible as a cold brick wall. Invisible Ones gives me the creeps. The willies. The heebie-jeebies. Goose-pimples and belly butterflies and...
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BECAUSE YOU NEED TO KNOW:
"Invisible Ones" by Orenda Fink
Saddle Creek Records
Released 8/23/05
Produced by Andy Lemaster
35 min.
SONGS: Leave It All - Invisible Ones Guard The Gate - Bloodline - Blind Asylum - Les Invisibles - Miracle Worker - No Evolution - Dirty South - Easter Island - Animal
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OF FURTHER INTEREST:
Maria Taylor - 11:11 (2005)
Azure Ray - Hold On Love (2003)
Recommended:
Yes
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plorentz
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Member: Paul Lorentz
Location: The Land of Limburger and Leinenkugel's
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About Me:
Somebody turn the lights on...
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