First Aid Kit

Manchester Club Academy 25/02/12

Rolling into Manchester off yet another junction and appearing just where we wanted to be at the appointed time felt great. I had a spring in my step anyway from hearing this Swedish sibling pair's latest album and the amzing harmonies, the love-lorn lyrics and retro country folk feel. There's always room for more of that, especially when it's executed with such untainted simplicity.

Just the two of them and a drummer means that the gorgeous pedal steel of the record is not in evidence but this is all about the voices and especially that of older sister Joanna Soderberg. With influences as overt as theirs (the third song in is entitled 'Emmylou' and Joni Mitchell isn't far away in 'Blue') there is no hint of Swedishness in either their singing or spoken words, and Joanna is like Linda Ronstadt in her prime with a range that straddles a delicate falsetto and a big booming lower register, underpinned by the seamless harmonies of the younger Klara.

It's a typical 'new country' crowd, with plenty of older types who, like me, have had their appetite for live music regenerated by the guilt-free nostalgia of young bands discovering their own identity by delving back to the likes of Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris. It's also a very noisy crowd and the volume is gradually turned up to counteract the hubbub at the back of the room. Only for an unamplified 'Ghost Town' do they get the quiet needed to allow the pastoral messages of their lyrics to penetrate and after that it's business as usual as people go back to their animated conversations.

I close my eyes and focus on the music. This enables me to by-pass the antics of a couple of idiots with cameras in front of me and eventually I'm able to filter out the background noise. 'In The Hearts Of Men', 'The Lion's Roar' - these are sophisticated songs with observations on life that should come from older hearts than these twenty somethings. The purity of their voices is etched with a world weariness that can only have come from a close scrutiny of the Nashville tradition but it's because of their youth that the tales of broken marriages ('This Old Routine') lack emotional authenticity. As beautiful as their sound is, there is a depth required that can only come from putting more years on the board. Still, this is a chulish point when set against the talent and the confidence - even with the least attentive of audiences they were unphased and undoubtedly set for bigger things on festival stages during the summer.