22 June 2023 - 0 Comments

The secret is out. Orangefarm — a band that has enjoyed the mantle of being one of New Zealand's best kept indie music secrets for far too long — has released their debut album Inheritance.

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Its 13 tracks make for an expansive collection of hearty guitar-pop and dreamy, wiry art-rock propelling the literate songs of band singer-guitarist Nigel Mitchell.

It's an album of “intelligent details … seductive mood pieces … and guile-free, observational pop” says Graham Reid of the NZ Listener.

It's also an album which resounds with echoes of NZ's left-field music past. But that history emerges refreshed and bent into elegant new shapes. All by a band which is happy to deliver a sunny, folk-rock jangle, as it is to build songs around jagged rhythms and squalling guitars. Or content to leave some —like the stunning, swirling title track —spare and understated.

Between the surging opening song, You Should Have Said, and the headrush Bowie-esque finale of Love in the Time of Foolishness, it's not an album that stays for long in the same gear.

But throughout, the voice and lyrics of Mitchell, also the band's deft guitarist, gives each song a wry, bittersweet quality — even when they are briefly delivered backwards on the twitchy penultimate song Pressure.

With its references to the Martin Amis novel The Pregnant Widow, Pressure might suggest Orangefarm is more a book club than a nightclub kind of band, while Old Heart references Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem Spring and Fall.

But Inheritance is a great page-turner of an album not because of its clever footnotes; it's because it's powered by indelible tunes and songs with emotional and musical punch. That's especially true on the likes of Conversation with My Grandmother, an unsentimental reflection on childhood memories. Or on the title track, a contemplation of things passed on, a theme that runs throughout.

As a song Inheritance is a striking piece of sunroom psychedelia. And with the similarly graceful Listen, it's one of two killer dual-vocal moments Mitchell has with Celia McAlpine, who was for a time the band's bassist. Her four-string forerunner and successor, Peter Holm, brings both drive and baroque melodicism to much of the set.

The recording also benefits from two great, expressive drummers — Caroline Easther (The Chills and Let's Planet) and the long-serving Karen Apperley, whose rollicking toms kick the album into high gear on the aforementioned You Should Have Said.

Elsewhere, Mitchell embraces his South Island of NZ roots. Old Heart opens with a guitar that sounds beamed in from Dunedin circa 1984, before the song heads back to the future on the power-surge bassline; Early single Settle (In Your Eyes) may just be one of the best songs southern stalwarts The Bats never wrote.

The likes of Simple complete with the plaintive French horn of Vivien Reid, or In the Morning suggests The Smiths-gone-Americana and some might hear stronger reverberations of the 80's English band in These Things Don't Concern Me.

The album is being released by Failsafe Records, the Christchurch-born fiercely independent label whose founder Rob Mayes produces. He also brought his own musical skills on 12-string electric guitar and percussion. With the initial recordings done at a variety of Wellington venues, Mayes mixed the album at his Avalanche Studios in Tokyo where he now lives.

Mayes had been an admirer of Mitchell's talent since his days as sound engineer for the songwriter's early Garden City band The Rue. Over the years, the pair collaborated on recordings and kept in touch after Mitchell migrated north to Wellington, where, eventually, he formed Orangefarm which began its recording life with a series of EPs.

In 2021, Mayes reworked Mitchell's Who is Dianne, his contribution to Failsafe's South compilation deluxe edition. Inspired by that song, and hearing a long-lost demo of 'Listen', he proposed they combine his producing skills with Mitchell's songsmithery and his band's musicianship on creating the definitive Orangefarm album. And here it is.

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