Harriet Gibsone 

First Aid Kit: Stay Gold review –

Johanna and Klara Söderberg's major label debut finds them in fine voice as ever, writes Harriet Gibsone
  
  

First Aid Kit
Chiming like a Swedish Everly Brothers… First Aid Kit Photograph: PR

It's six years since sisters Johanna and Klara Söderberg uploaded the woodland-set Fleet Foxes cover that would go on to grant them fame. Three albums in, and their voices still chime like a Swedish Everly Brothers, but the pressures of being a 20-something success story seep from their country ballads – perhaps a product of their recent signing to a major and the intensive touring they did in their teens. Waitress Song finds them fantasising about alternative professions ("I could move to a small town and become a waitress/ Say my name was Stacy and figure things out") and they reluctantly turn their back on a love "that could have been" on A Long Time Ago. The finest moment comes on the motel blues of Ceder Lane, and as they ask "how could I break away from you?" – it sounds more like a reassuring sentiment shared between sisters, rather than lovers.

 

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