Album Review - First Aid Kit - The Big Black and Blue

Typically, teenagers spend more time applying clumpy mascara to their hungover eyes than actually thinking about anything substantial. Or do they?

Swedish sisters, Klara and Joana have caused quite a frenzy among Britian’s twenty-something music lovers. As their gentle European vocals purr over twee guitars, First Aid Kit tap into the disenchantment of every mortgage-burdened man and his unappreciated wives. But with their median age reaching just over seventeen, their maturity as they delicately exclaim /Life is tough on me/ is enchanting but somehow wholly believable.

Perhaps it’s because as we cast our minds back to our misspent youth, we remember how we saw the disappointment of marriage firsthand and endured the backbreaking pain of losing a first love. We felt everything Klara and Joana feel. We just lacked the nomenclature and inordinate musical abilities to articulate it in the way that the likes of Laura Marling and First Aid Kit do so well.

Combining the spine-chilling simplicity of ‘The Morning’ and stripped folk gloom of ‘Hard Believer’, First Aid Kit’s debut album is dripping with preverbal sepia tones and miserabalism in a way that serves as a welcome reminder that not all teenagers are as toxic to society as Lady Sovereign. Honestly.

Release Date: 25th January 2010
Label: Wichita
Rating: 7/10


By Laura Routledge