Bloodline

"Orenda Fink, born in Alabama in the mid-'70s, comes by her unusual name honestly, judging by the songs on her 2005 debut album, Invisible Ones. Unlike her former bandmate Maria Taylor, the other half of the successful sulk-pop band Azure Ray, Fink focuses less on standard girl group fare such as heartache and melancholy in favor of exploring the mystical, the mind-bending, and the murky. It's a mélange that, for listeners accustomed to the milky musings of her former band, offers its challenges. Voodoo music, for example, surfaces as part of Fink's post-Azure sound -- an homage to the Haitian people, whom she came to love during a spiritually awakening trip to the island -- and lyrically she is not above cribbing the rantings of a mentally unstable woman she once shared a Greyhound bus ride with. But Fink's music is as direct as it is adventurous, her voice a lozenge in a land mine of neo-new wave, electronica, and worldbeat, and listeners who have followed her career since she and Taylor first started making music together as students at the Alabama School of Fine Arts at age 15 won't want to distance themselves from it." -allmusic.com