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First Aid Kit -- The Lion's Roar

Klara and Johanna Söderbergs' singing is a sound worth building a band around -- luscious but haunting, tender but stern, with as much of that flock-of-birds collective-consciousness thing as any of their peers, current or historical. Those tightly braided vocals have served as First Aid Kit's calling card since 2008, when they uploaded a bare-bones YouTube cover of Fleet Foxes' "Tiger Mountain Peasant Song" that's been viewed nearly three million times; the duo's 2010 debut, The Big Black and the Blue, opened with a minute-long a cappella stretch. 

Mike Mogis of Bright Eyes produced The Lion's Roar at his ARC Studios, where he staffed the sessions with a number of players from Nebraska's tight-knit Saddle Creek scene, including Ben Brodin and Nate Walcott. Mr. Omaha himself, Conor Oberst, even shows up on the album's closer, "King of the World," a cheerful, foot-stomping ditty about one day waking up "all alone with a big family and emptiness deep in my bones." To that the Bright Eyes frontman can't help appending the kind of vaguely apocalyptic aphorism for which he's so adored: "If you fall for your reflection," Oberst warns, "you will drown in a dream." Duuude.

In spite of all the work he throws his pals, Mogis never allows the arrangements to pull focus from Klara and Johanna Söderbergs' vocals. The closest Mogis gets to ball-hogging here is "Dance to Another Tune," which with its tolling piano and seasick strings comes on like Lana Del Rey's "Video Games." As soon as they open their mouths, though, Klara and Johanna retake center stage, ruminating on how "there's nothing new under the sun" and "all that will happen has already begun." Probably, yeah. But First Aid Kit reaffirm those familiar truths beautifully.

By Mikael Wood, SPIN

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