The Orchard presents the listener with a bunch of backwards backwater musicians, their brains fried from too much sun and too much moonshine. They roll their eyes and dribble lop-sided grins as they play a mixture of bluegrass, folk, Appalachian field recordings and blues, with the indigenous folk musics of Mediterranean countries very subtly seeping through. This is the quintet Fire On Fire, previous members of underground band Cerberus Shoals, signed to Young God records. They use stand up bass, banjo, mandolin, harmonium, accordion, acoustic guitar, dobro and other instruments to create this shambling music, which seems quite content to regress back to older times.Well, maybe they aren’t quite as unhinged as I’m making out, but there are definitely some psychedelic veins running through The Orchard. Bifurcated vocals from the female member of the group grace ‘Assinine Race’, she pulls off a great squirmy weirdness with high pitched and pinched singing, relating lines like 'I’m collecting dead men as we speak', or 'Sucking smoke from nostril to eeeeaaaarr' from ‘Squeeze Box’. And it’s quite hard (beyond what’s already mentioned) to define just exactly what unsettles an otherwise seemingly calm and reflective sound, there’s just something not quite right, something skewed, instruments are strummed just a little too hard, there’s just a bit more conviction in the vocals than you’re comfortable with.There are a lot of lovely moments to be found on The Orchard, moments that come across as pretty much straight-forward folk/bluegrass/etc, and work really well, exceptionally well, without the more freakish aspects. Songs like ‘Heavy D’ with it’s heavy emotional vocal and melancholic melody, ‘Flordinese’, an accordion melody moaning, some slow builds into intensity, before evaporating to twinkling plucks, or ‘Toknight’ a good-natured drunken hoedown, sound great. Others such as ‘The Orchard’, ‘Grin’ and ‘Sirocco’ seem like they lack the compelling qualities of those other tracks, they don’t produce a clear evocation or feeling, they’re more like going through the motions of the style Fire On Fire are presenting on The Orchard.The album is 50 minutes plus, and maybe some songs could’ve been cut, or others could’ve been imbued with a clearer sense of purpose, but it doesn’t ruin what is here. When listening to Bowerbirds-esque ‘Flight Song’, with its spare picking, upright bass and swaying group vocal, it’s hard to dwell on the negatives. 70%Fire On Fire on MySpace