Music

First Aid Kit, Usher Hall, Edinburgh

Graeme Thomson

FOUR STARS

As everyone from Leonard Cohen to Richard Thompson knows, you need a keen sense of humour to make a living playing sad songs. For this rammed Edinburgh gig, Swedish sisters Klara and Johanna Söderberg duly served up their exquisite melancholy with a generous side order of gags and giggles. The stage set featured a backdrop of mini-pyramids, suggesting they'd taken their Spinal Tap references and run with them. They passed around a bottle of Irn-Bru, vamped a knockabout rendition of the White Stripes' Seven Nation Army, and gently ragged on Art Garfunkel and Paul Simon - "a sweet little guy" - before a haunting cover of America.

The joshing was a side show to the main event, which was the way Klara's astonishingly pure lead voice dovetailed with the pitch-perfect harmonies of Johanna (the latter, crucially, also delivered extensive hair-swinging from behind her keyboard). Expanding their line-up to a four-piece through the unfussy addition of drums, pedal steel, and occasional mandolin and electric guitar, the set focused primarily on latest album, Stay Gold, and its predecessor The Lion's Roar.

The likes of Master Pretender, Heaven Knows and Wolf had a whipcrack energy absent from the records, but it was the tearjerkers that hit hardest. Ghost Town, delivered unamplified from the fringe of the stage, was spine-tingling. Shattered & Hollow, reminiscent of a clinically depressed Ronettes, oozed slow, sad magic. At other times the modish blend of American folk and country influences felt more rudimentary, but even these moments were elevated by the fact that the Söderbergs possess pipes capable of turning mediocre songs into good ones, and great songs into, well, gold.