Gig review: First Aid Kit at the Wardrobe

Guest post from reviewer Sam Monk (@smonk78)

Samantha Crain, a mid-western troubadour, is so small that were your view of the stage slightly obscured you would swear she was sitting down, but there is nothing small about her voice which is a full-throated bellow, that you imagine she has developed as a result of years spent fighting to be heard above the din and racket of drunken bar brawls in the boondocks of her native Oklahoma. During a short solo set (she normally tours with a band but in an all to familiar tale these days financial pressures meant she could not afford to bring them over for this jaunt) of confessional, bittersweet, country tinged ballads married to wonderfully imagistic lyrics full of beautifully turned phrases, she proves herself to be an endearingly garrulous and engaging performer, littering her time on stage with kooky and slightly fantastical tales of meeting buskers who share her name.

No doubt the songs lack the force and impact they would have played with a full band, and anyone with a passing familiarity with the American acoustic singer-songwriter milieu will know she isn’t tearing up any stylistic envelopes (think a female Ray LaMontagne), but nonetheless Scissor Tales is a captivatingly elegiac tale of loss that never descends into mawkishness backed by an arpeggiated guitar figure, whilst Lions, featuring an impassioned vocal and a musical accompaniment brimming with full throttled attack, has a strident, propulsive toughness to it. However, the highlight of the set comes in the form of the brittle, undulating ballad We Are The Same which combines a touching, tender lyric with a spectral, finger-picked guitar melody; the song perfectly encapsulating Crain’s appeal – traditional yet accomplished and, perhaps more importantly, affecting.

First Aid Kit, the adopted moniker of precociously talented Swedish sisters Johanna and Klara Soderberg, take to the stage with little fanfare as seems to befit their unassuming Scandinavian roots – their complete lack of ostentation is typified by the fact that Klara spends the first three songs shrouded in darkness due to a problem with the lights without seeming to be phased or agitated, whilst the time between songs is spent talking in Swedish to their sound engineer who, it soon transpires, is also their father. For a band whose most recent release entered the charts at No 1 across Scandinavia, this truly is a charmingly modest familial affair. With the addition of a drummer, the sister’s perform the bulk of The Lion’s Roar, their second album of haunting, spectral Americana and it is intoxicatingly immaculate stuff, particularly where the intuitive, yet meticulous and highly-practiced, vocal harmonising is concerned.

They start in relatively subdued fashion with the pretty lament that is In the Hearts of Men and Blue, whose hesitantly upbeat melody belies a lyric consumed by the pain of death and the loss of first love. This Old Routine, an old-before-their-time song about the souring of a once passionate relationship features a piercing vocal harmony line and a driving guitar figure allied to a swirling organ melody. The prevailing atmosphere of plangency fades in the second half as the trio pick up the pace and the volume with rousing, energetic versions of title track, the Lion’s Roar, which has a waltz time feel and is accompanied by much banshee-like head thrashing from Johanna (the slightly unhinged, gothic element of their live performance is something of a pleasant surprise), I Met the King from the debut album, a gorgeous, heart-swelling Emmylou, a homage to their primary source of inspiration, a mischievous, knowing cover of compatriot Fever Ray’s When I Grow Up and a rollicking, exuberant rendition of King of the World (sadly minus Conor Oberst’s harmony part present on the album cut) which closes the evening amidst howls of approval.

It is difficult to fault such a highly polished performance but there are times when the vocals err towards the shrill end of the spectrum, whilst the siblings could benefit from introducing a bit more subtlety and variation into their songwriting. At times their youth also works against them, with the core of the songs often devoid of the visceral emotion that comes from having lived a life, resulting in the songs occasionally coming freighted with a hollow inauthenticity. There is also something subconsciously disquieting about the idea of two such young performers producing work that is so burnished and composed it appears to lack any expression of the turmoil or messiness of adolescence, but really these minor gripes are blown away when they punctuate their set with the most mesmerising, breathtaking version of Ghost Town, which they perform bathed in light at the front of the stage without amplification, which is fine because the crowd is awe struck into almost total silence by the tenderly exquisite harmony singing, save for the tentative beginnings of a mass singalong. It is one of those moments of almost palpable communal bonding that many bands strive for but very few achieve. In that moment you’d believe that this First Aid Kit could salve all the world’s ills.