First Aid Kit The Jericho, Oxford 3/3/10
2/5
By: Liane Escorza
First Aid Kit - the two Swedish nu-folk sisters, the two angelical emerging artists, the two none-more-suave troubadours - are here to cool our anger, heal our pain and soothe our bedtime fears. With their excellent new album The Big Black & The Blue in tow, they march onstage swiftly accompanied by an additional member, a drummer. Expectations are high - yet what we are awarded is a combination of irritating unpreparedness and a perhaps understandable lack of maturity.
It doesn’t help to know that the PA at this venue is not the hippest, but taking 5 to 10 minutes to fix broken strings, not once but twice, at the beginning of the set, because “this has never happened before!” and because daddy decided to put the guitar away rather than have it ready “just in case”, seemed to show a bit of a lack of effort towards the evening’s show.
Their voices are usually beautiful, but tonight they come and go in trembles of oddity and self-doubt while the drummer does his job without breaking a sweat. First track off the album ‘In The Morning’ passes ghostly, drums providing a backing numb beat, which they could easily have done without. It doesn’t get any better once things are all warmed up, and even when offering a cover of a Fleet Foxes song we’re applauding the originality of the Seattle’s band’s piece, rather than the girls’ mastery.
The light at the end of this narrowing tunnel was the moment they decided to ditch microphones and pickups and sing au naturel, leaning closer to the front row and going back to their minimalist approach to last year’s summer festivals. The folks respond with utter silence, all eyes locked onto the stage, all ears pointing upwards. It is a moment of glory, a spark, a vision of what First Aid Kit may become in a near future.
Artists in this article: First Aid Kit
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