Orenda Fink scarcely moves on stage. The Omaha songwriter has no between-song quips that illuminate hidden meanings, no supertext that unwinds them or winds them all-the-tighter. And she travels with no six-person animatronic ensemble to recreate the wide and hypnotic soundscapes of her new Saddle Creek album Blue Dream.
What Fink did in the Slowdown frontroom Saturday night was minimalist. Her steady picking fingers, milky voice, Greg Elsasser’s ghoulish saw-bowing and Jiha Lee’s incredibly resonant and over-arching voice undulated impeccably between vulnerable and dominant.
After its August release, Saturday marked the end of Fink’s national tour for Blue Dream, and it was time to sit with the album’s songs in a way Omaha listeners knew for months they’d be able to. The crowd probably eeked just over 100, but the people sitting at the tables and standing around the stage seemed to peer with the same inquisitive eyes.
If there are lyrical moments on Fink’s album that seem excessively axiomal, anyone who spent increasing listens with Blue Dream knew it was a matter of time before the sentiments would bend and strike at the right angle. It’s not the sort of album fixated on first impressions. As Fink closed the show with “Holy Holy,” the earth-mother voice she’d inhabited throughout the night peaked: “We come into this world all alone and we leave without much more.”
On an album that enshrines the experiences of personal and cosmic love and death, the lyric doesn’t leap out of the bed of tasteful electronica and dreamy ambiance. But after hearing the album performed in its near entirety, you sat with it in the candlelight of the Slowdown’s bar on one of the first cold nights of the fall, and it was the quiet, aching growth of a truism into a truth.
A quick cheers to opener Anna McClellan (formerly of Howard), whose stylistic movements are piano can just be confounding. The songs dabble in classical, blues, jazz and major chord balladeering, but never settle into any of them for more than a refrain. Her droning voice, capable of both clarity and Joyner-esque moans, touts such a blend of intensity and apathy, many songs feel on the cusp of total self-defeat, waiting until the last possible second to fight back.
