Album of the Week: First Aid Kit deliver pop brilliance with ‘Palomino’
When your only criticism of an album is that it comes at the wrong time of year and leaves you craving the summer breeze through your ill-kept locks, you’re dealing with a golden record. First Aid Kit are now five features into their beauteous music extolment, and Palomino is another assured step by the harmonising Swedish sisters.
This time out, the music is a poppy boon that eviscerates the current permacrisis with a sense of sunny escapism. That’s not to say that the record isn’t spiritually cognizant. It just has enough swagger about it to cut through any dower malaise in a fashion akin to one of the best songs of recent times, Miley Cyrus’ ‘Nothing Breaks Like a Heart’, both musically and with its sanguine bloody-mindedness.
Their old folk origins are still evident in the occasional plucking guitar and wailing violin, but for the most part, the structure of these songs is much more pop inclined. Nevertheless, this isn’t to be seen as a move geared towards commercialism. It’s an evolution that lets them feel liberated, and their voices soar therein. Backed with rolling rhythms, the duo find themselves right in the zone to let it all out.
Everything about the album has an upfront maturity to it. Hell, they’ve even been forthright with the press for it, aptly saying, “We were inspired by Fleetwood Mac, Kate Bush and Tom Petty.” Each of those names seems on the money with this effort. Fleetwood Mac feature in the musicology throughout, Kate Bush comes through in the soaring spiritualism, and Tom Petty adds a dose of hair-swinging swagger to proceedings.
Earlier in the year, the album was announced in style with ‘Angel’. The track has been an earworm lodged forcefully in many fans’ minds. Thankfully, it proved a solid indicator of the other melodious entreaties on display. Softer, more autumnal moments come to the fore, but Angel’s road-tripping pleasure is uproariously repeated. This isn’t just a pleasant album that’ll slot back in the shelf after a few joyous listens and then get forgotten about; it’s simply too catchy for that.
And sometimes, you can’t beat a bit of good old catchiness. Palomino is brimming with it. There are more hooks here than in a fishing tackle museum, and they are elevated further by the sunset imagery that the poetry coaxes. It is, in short, an album that transports you to somewhere more fulfilling than where you were before you first hit play.
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