"Sailor Song," the third track from First Aid Kit's impressive debut album The Big Black and the Blue, begins with a beautifully simple, lilting melody, one that sounds like it could have been lifted, or at least reworked, from an old Appalachian folk ballad. Over a gently strummed autoharp — recorded so intimately that you can hear the pick zip over the thin strings — the song's story begins to unfold: the light of the moon touching the bedroom window, a girl walking out onto her front porch expectantly. And then, as the last notes of autoharp ring out, the singer counts out a new, quicker tempo — in Swedish.
If Caitlin Rose had grown up with cradle-to-grave health care, or The Peasall Sisters kept more to the agnostic side of life, they might sound something like First Aid Kit. The Swedish duo — Johanna and Klara Söderberg, possibly the only musical sisters currently in business and not using "Sisters" in their stage name — sing perfect, clarion harmonies, have a tremendous intuitive sense of melody and can put a railroad track in a song lyric without making an eye-rolling cliché out of it.
Where acts like T Bone Burnett-produced The Secret Sisters like to present their old-timey music with throwback curls and postwar dresses, First Aid Kit are as likely to look like they've just stepped out of an IKEA catalog as out of a black-and-white movie. And when they pull out a cover song, it's not "Big River" or some such — the B-side of their "Ghost Town" single is a version of Fever Ray's "When I Grow Up," which somehow manages to transform the original's electronically warped meditation into a rolling, folky shuffle reminiscent of "La Complainte du Partisan." (Fever Ray's Karin Dreijer Andersson is half of the sister-brother duo The Knife, whose Rabid Records released First Aid Kit's Drunken Trees EP.)
The songwriting on The Big Black and the Blue isn't always brilliant, but the melodies are timeless and alive, and the singing is undeniably charismatic. The lyrics have moments of real surprise, too. A line from "Winter Is All Over You": "I saw your mother at the department store / She looked innocent like a stillborn."
Even when the songs teeter on the brink of sentimentality — which they do with a fearlessness that is its own kind of charm — there isn't a hint of preciousness or pretense in the way they're sung. That absence of affectation would be impressive in singers decades older than the Söderbergs — neither of whom is old enough to drink booze (in the U.S., at least), much less to have experienced the lifetimes of loss they write into their songs. Some acts who fall under the "indie-folk" banner (as opposed to the somewhat woolier "Americana") might try to dress things up in pseudo-mythology or wash out their sound with voluminous, flaw-concealing reverb. But First Aid Kit tell stories. And they sing them in flawlessly intertwined voices that are strong, clear and direct.
