Orangefarm Release New Album ‘Motoring For Beginners’
Orangefarm is backing out of the driveway with a trailer load of great songs on new album Motoring for Beginners. The sophomore album by the Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington indie band follows and builds upon the group’s widely acclaimed 2023 debut Inheritance.
The three earlier singles Affectionate Friction and Your Sister’s Friends and Outside Your Car gave a taste of the range of songs on the album, the latter reveling in the band’s increasing creative confidence, its warm melodicism, and widescreen delivery.
Motoring for Beginners is a showcase for the wry songcraft of singer-guitarist Nigel Mitchell, the 15 tracks brought energetically and colourfully to life by band members Peter Holm (bass), Clint Meech (keyboards), Boyd Dixon (drums) Vivien Reid (French horn, vocals), and the production of Rob Mayes.
The new album augments the chiming guitar pop and dreamy art-rock of the debut with an expanded sonic palette and bigger studio ambitions.
That includes the orchestral surge that brings The Choir to a dramatic end; the loose-hipped polyrhythms of Amplifier; the vocal duets of spartan opening track On Reading the Coalition Agreement and The Weather, aptly sounding like it’s being played in the teeth of a stiff southerly; the pulsating electronics driving the closing B11.
Elsewhere, the album’s first single Affectionate Friction, offers a lovely, unhurried, dreamy ode to long-term love in which Mitchell relocates a line from a Shakespeare sonnet in the song’s autumnal, domestic setting. With the dreamy atmosphere conjured up by the quintet, in which Reid’s French horn helps set the wistful mood.
The album’s more melancholy side includes Recipe for Loneliness and My Brother and Me, both songs reflecting on loss and family as an adult. While Summer and Burning Hilltop look back at childhood through much different lenses.
Less seriously, second single All Your Sister’s Friends, which has already become a live favourite, has its jaunty Velvet Underground groove as launchpad to blistering guitar.
Orangefarm has been a fixture on the Wellington music scene for 20 years as a vehicle for Mitchell’s songwriting which has tapped the spirit of alternative South Island outfits of the 1980s – Mitchell originally hails from Christchurch and started his music career there – as well as British and Australian post-punk and indie touchstones.
Motoring for Beginners will be available on CD and high-quality downloads via Bandcamp from October 2.
CDs will also be available at JB Hi-fi stores near you from 12 October.
