(2014) First Aid Kit - Stay Gold
Review:
Swedish folk-pop duo First Aid Kit's third LP and first for Columbia is their grandest and arguably their most consistent release to date, featuring weary songs about transience that approach their conflicts with wiseness and maturity.
Outside of high school curricula and motivational posters, Robert Frost is not an especially popular literary influences these days. Two roads diverged in the woods and most people could give a shit. When sisters Johanna and Klara Söderberg named both a song and their third album together as First Aid Kit after Frost’s poem “Nothing Gold Can Stay”, from his Pulitzer-winning 1923 collection New Hampshire, the choice seemed to reflect their youth: The sisters signed their first record contract in 2008 when Johanna was 17 and Klara 14, both around the age when most readers have Frost thrust upon them. On the other hand, the Söderbergs are Swedish, not American. And instead of stopping by woods on a snowy evening, they’ve chosen Frost’s elegy to the natural state of entropy. “Nature’s first green is gold, her hardest hue to hold,” he writes. “So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay.”
It’s a darker and more fatalistic sentiment than we typically expect from Frost, a sunny reminder than nothing continues in its ideal state. Everything fades. We all die. First Aid Kit understand this inevitability, yet they have the tenacity and optimism to fight against that falling apart. “What if our hard work ends in despair?” the sisters ask on “Stay Gold”, as a guitar plucks out a stoic theme and the percussion echoes against canyon walls. “What if the road won’t take me there?” They’re not jaded—at least not yet. The Söderbergs remain romantics in an unromantic world, not only writing lyrics about fighting the good fight but making the kind of wide-eyed, ‘70s-tinged folk-rock that thrives on soaring vocals, warm harmonies, big choruses, and heart-on-sleeve lyrics.
There’s plenty of each on Stay Gold, their first record for Columbia. It’s certainly their grandest and arguably their most consistent release to date, even if there’s nothing here as undeniable as “Emmylou”, from 2012’s The Lion’s Roar. With its affectionate hook, that song was both a paean to country music romance and a mission statement; ostensibly the lyrics were directed toward a male counterpart, but it sounded more like the sisters were inviting each other to sing along. Stay Gold similarly conveys the joys of musical collaboration—their voices always sound good together—yet they’re not quite so convinced of the merits of the music industry. These are weary songs about transience: touring constantly, missing home, losing friends and lovers. It’s darker than Roar, but also wiser, more mature in its conflicts. First Aid Kit still can’t sell a line like, “Shit gets fucked up and people just disappear,” but they convey the dusty self-assertion of “The Bell” like it’s gospel.
Tracklist:
01 My Silver Lining.flac
02 Master Pretender.flac
03 Stay Gold.flac
04 Cedar Lane.flac
05 Shattered & Hollow.flac
06 The Bell.flac
07 Waitress Song.flac
08 Fleeting One.flac
09 Heaven Knows.flac
10 A Long Time Ago.flac
Summary:
Country: Sweden
Genre: Indie-Folk
Media Report:
Source : CD
Format : FLAC
Format/Info : Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode : Variable
Bit rate : ~767-969 Kbps
Channel(s) : 2 channels
Sampling rate : 44.1 KHz
Bit depth : 16 bits
