First Aid Kit – Tender Offerings (EP)
Columbia – 14 September 2018
Having released their Tucker Martine-produced fourth album Ruins, at the start of the year, Swedish songbird and songwriter sisters Johanna and Klara Söderberg return with this unexpected and wholly delightful EP (available digitally and as a ltd edition 10”) comprising of four numbers recorded in the same sessions, but which didn’t fit with the overall break-up theme.
That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re any the lighter in their sentiments. First up, backed by a simple circular electric guitar pattern gradually augmented by electric piano, the six and a half minute I’ve Wanted You is about emptiness, being alone and a yearning for love as, hearing long songs come from the radio in the flat upstairs, they sing about “being so close and so far away”, but “not ready to go back there to wait for someone else to leave.”
Likewise, bolstered by a steady muted drum thump and shimmering chimes, the closing All That We Get is a musing on being unfulfilled, “having nothing to look back upon” and how “there are many places to go, things that we will never know”, concluding that “if you’re going to run you’d better run fast.”
Sandwiched in-between, the uptempo title track itself, fingerpicked, echoingly sung and pedal-steel shaded, is a slightly more optimistic number where, despite the broken shards of false promises, soothing tongue and foolish hope, it’s “a new day in my house” with “a hunger in my bones.”
The final track, dreamily picked out on understated keys and drums, Ugly embraces a linked theme of compromising who you are to win the affections of others, but again is underpinned with a defiant self-belief rising out of the ashes as they achingly croon “if I’m ugly, I’m so much more than that, I’m so much more than you’ll ever know.” Try a little tenderness.
Photo courtesy of label