First Aid Kit is two sisters, Swedish, last name Söderberg. Klara is younger and shorter, the one with the dark bangs cut right across her heavy eyes, who sings with a crooked underbite that she could probably never set straight without wrecking the lovely specificity of her voice, the slight lisp of it, her languid vowels. Johanna, the older one, about whom everything is long (her limbs, her blondish mane), mostly sings harmony; her voice is darker and heavier and comes from somewhere different from her sister's. Klara seems to coax hers out from just under her tongue, while Johanna, her eyes growing wide and distant whenever she has some bars to herself, often appears to be channeling something far beyond her body, beyond the room, beyond even the sky.
Last year, First Aid Kit went to Omaha make their second album, The Lion's Roar, with Mike Mogis, a producer and also a member of Bright Eyes, perhaps the first band that Klara loved. Their debut, 2010's The Big Black and the Blue, released when the sisters were just 17 and 19, was so striking-- with their otherworldly, interlocking voices and uncanny understanding of imagined adult pains-- that the tracks' demo-grade quality was easily overlooked. This time, though, they have all of Mogis' bells and whistles at their disposal: his way of almost imperceptibly coaxing a song into full bloom, his feel for when to gussy-up and when to strip away, but also, yes, actual bells and whistles, or at least one deeply eerie flute tone that lingers throughout, floating in and out of scenes like a sly specter. And a new clutch of friends appears for the closing track, "King of the World", a song so jumpy and earnest and ecstatically terrified by the unknowable future that Conor Oberst seems to have had no choice but to consummate the clear homage to the best of his mid-2000s output by making an appearance himself, along with the Felice Brothers, whose showing as a wheezy, rattletrap backing band nearly redeems their dismal 2011 album, Celebration Florida.
For the sisters' part, their voices are steadier now, and richer, as if they were told enough times how good they are that they're finally resigned to believing it. (It's a shame, then, that Mogis can get a bit heavy-handed with the reverb-- their nakedly mic'd voices are almost always more stunning.) The choruses are big and chewy, even on the most melancholy tracks-- "Blue" is perhaps one of the more charming songs ever involving the phrase "now you're just a shell of your former youth" and would be even without the twinkly glockenspiel and bumpy little bassline. Thanks to Mogis, The Lion's Roar would sound like a very good album even if it wasn’t one-- but likewise would be stunning even if the band had been left to its own devices.
And yes, that's very likely "Blue" as a Joni Mitchell allusion, though the rambling, scatter-pitched confession of "New Year's Eve" may be more of a direct tribute. First Aid Kit have this guileless way of making their influences clear, as if offering up the source code of their art to the world, not as proof of anything but in a spirit of communion-- perhaps most specifically making the offering to girls just a few years behind them, sitting under the grip of some pair of huge headphones in their childhood bedrooms, hearing the Söderberg sisters' words and voices for the first time, feeling something shift inside them, wondering where this beautiful thing came from, and finding clues there even before they know it.
"Emmylou", maybe the best song on the album, and its second single, does this most deftly and most directly. "I'll be your Emmylou, and I'll be your June/ If you'll be my Gram and my Johnny, too," the chorus blurts over bashful drums and wry pedal steel, the sisters shaking out the one-syllable names with giddy relish. Do you know any other song involving young women trying to romance would-be beaus with sweet sweet voices and Americana trivia? "I'm not asking much of you/ Just sing, little darlin', sing with me," the chorus continues, but if all they really wanna do is croon a few numbers, I'll eat my Nudie suit.
Klara and Johanna say they wrote the song before they'd set foot in America. As if to make up for lost time, last year, when they finally came over to the States, they went to California, out to Joshua Tree. It was the birthday of Gram Parsons, who would have been 65 if he hadn't died there when he was 26. They made the music video for "Emmylou" there, wearing caftans and drifting side by side through the scrubby desert like characters in a psychedelic Aaron Sorkin drama. They burn incense at a cross made of colored stones, an ad hoc tribute to the more official ad hoc tribute kept up for Parsons there at the park; they wave the smoke with their small hands; they throw out their arms and let their sleeves flutter out in the wind.
I wonder what they thought about when they were out there-- if they felt new, if they felt homesick, if they were somehow disappointed, despite everything, to not see Gram himself wandering over the hills. I wonder if they thought about how they will most likely outlive him, how one day they will have been making music longer than he was even alive, how one day they will outgrow their caftans and their crosses, how the most beautiful songs they're ever going to write are still waiting for them out there in the future somewhere.
