On their previous two albums, First Aid Kit’s keening country-pop was somewhat undermined by the odd sense that Swedish sisters Johanna and Klara Söderberg might be engaged in a game of musical make-believe. On stage and in interviews, their American accents were immaculate – which, unfairly perhaps, coloured perceptions of their authenticity. Their songs were heftily provisioned with the sort of grit and melancholy that sustained Johnny Cash and Emmylou Harris through their careers. And yet the question loomed large: what could two hayseed teens from suburban Stockholm truly know of pain and loss?
Recorded after 18 months of often exhausting touring and no little soul searching (the siblings agonized over whether to commit to music or full-time education), their third album, Stay Gold, doesn’t address head-on the suspicion that Johanna and Klara are performing roles rather than expressing some deep seated existential woe – but instead renders the notion increasingly irrelevant. Their voices interweave in a familiar twang; lyrically they remain obsessed with open roads, truck-stops, waitresses named ‘Stacey’ and the like; however, by now, the songwriting is so solid, that it all makes emotional sense. In a good way, there are reminders of Dolly Parton on opener ‘My Silver Lining’, while ‘Cedar Lane’ and ‘Master Pretender’ sound like something Emmylou might have put together in the early 70s. In short, Stay Gold is a convincing country album that deserves any success it has coming to it.
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