FANZINE

Klara Soderberg picks her guitar as older sister Johanna gazes to her right. It’s a strange but intriguing sight on YouTube––to see these Swedish sisters isolated in a wooded area, then to hear their voices burst like cannons and detonate with remarkable clarity.

Their cover of Fleet Foxes’ “Tiger Mountain Peasant Song” was the start of a trial-and-error process for the Soderberg sisters, who sing together as First Aid Kit. They toyed with twang in their first EP, Drunken Trees. In their first full-length The Black and the Blue they announce themselves with a few simple strums; then their voices take magnificent shape, with only the faintest of echoes indicating any sort of boundaries.

First Aid Kit has since covered a Buffy Sainte-Marie song for Jack White and “Dancing Barefoot” in front of a teary Patti Smith. But in interviews, the sisters remember the two albums that first inspired them to write songs, then dive into the vast Americana catalog for inspiration: Rabbit Fur Coat (Jenny Lewis with the Watson Twins) and I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning (Bright Eyes). They recall how those albums spoke to them with their saddest songs, such as Lewis’ “Melt Your Heart.”

In The Black and the Blue, First Aid Kit are poetic but concise, fully aware of speaking volumes as their words splinter under the inherent beauty of their voices. But in sophomore effort The Lion’s Roar, people searching for those same earth-shattering vocals will be hard-pressed to find them. Under the guidance of Mike Mogis––yes, the producer behind Rabbit Fur Coat and It’s Morning––First Aid Kit are now either cursing, rambling or whispering, but always focusing more on what they’re saying. They’re sounding more human.

While they occasionally walk alongside railroad tracks and sweetly offer to be your Emmylou, your June (“You’ll be my Gram and my Johnny too”), First Aid Kit are never stationed in dreamy landscapes and past eras for long. They’re wandering from shopping malls and walking through suburban neighborhoods, watching as a husband arrives home to find his wife searching though kitchen drawers––for what though, she isn’t sure.

Much of The Lion’s Roar plays out like conversations overheard. In the title track alone, First Aid Kit leaps from rushed reasoning (“Every single time it all shifts one way or another”) to measured but angry proclamations (“And I’m a goddamned coward / but then again, so are you”). The album’s most deafening sound is in “To a Poet, ” where Klara breaks free from singing in unison and the song’s masterful ascent to declare, “And there’s nothing you can do”––only to deflate, then muse, “And it always surprises me, how dark it gets this time of year.”

First Aid Kit take care in remembering whether lines of dialogue began with “child” or “darling.” Recollections of their own talks are vague but still believable, like in joyous conclusion “King of the World,” featuring the Felice Brothers and Conor Oberst himself. “At ten in the morning I was laughing at something / at the airport terminal, at nine in the evening / I was sitting, crying to you over the phone,” Klara sings, as if speaking directly to a best friend.

Or in the way she introduces First Aid Kit’s cover of “Tiger Mountain Peasant Song,” just a walk away from their home in suburban Stockholm. “So, uh, this is for you, Fleet Foxes,” Klara says to the camera, cheeks puffed with pride. “It’s a little gift from us.” The Lion’s Roar is a gift too––filled with stories in Ghost World settings, brimming with good intentions and genuine sympathy. Whether its stories actually belong to First Aid Kit or not, The Lion’s Roar feels far more personal.

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 The Lion’s Roar (Wichita Recordings) is available through iTunes today.