Key Tracks: "Sailor Song," "Ghost Town," "I Met Up With the King"

Like many others, I first saw First Aid Kit in a YouTube video in which they were covering Fleet Foxes' “Tiger Mountain Peasant Song." All I intended to do was learn how to play the song on guitar, thinking, “Maybe these two chicks can teach me. Whatevs.”

Failing at that though I did, there was a happy something that came from watching that over-one-million-views video. I had discovered Klara and Johanna Soderberg, the Swedish sisterly duo who had much more to offer than a cover of a song on YouTube. They had written tunes of their own that were just as melodic and riveting as any of Fleet Foxes' songs.

Two years later, First Aid Kit is here with their first full-length album, The Big Black and the Blue -- a line that came from one of their earlier songs, “Our Own Pretty Ways,” off their debut EP, Drunken Trees. With this album, it’s evident that these sisters received a sparkling gene from someone in their family, or at least an admirable and didactic upbringing. And while their average age is less than mine, they’re obviously still blossoming, just when one thought their maturity and demeanor couldn’t be any more delightful.

The Big Black and the Blue opens with the gentle tune “In the Morning,” where sparse guitar strums eventually shape into solely the alluring harmonies for which the sisters are noted. The song picks up with egg shakers, dainty bass drum beats and guitar plucks but then falls right back into ideal simplicity. It’s a befitting threshold.

“Heavy Storm” seems to be a song of question and doubt toward things they once believed in, but now those things are ceasing to exist. It’s delivered with a remorseful yet insightful voice.

The album’s single, “I Met Up With the King,” dwells within the traditional use of simple acoustics and two-way harmonies that manage to sound like an a capella group. After it dies down into tiny acoustics and one sister’s voice a little above an effortless whisper, the song enhances into its busiest moment. The sisters’ voices, for the first time ever, are not refined and beautiful, but instead are yelling and coarse. “There’s people thinking they know something now / Well I don’t know anything at all and we mean nothing to history / Well thank God.” When the young sisters sing of such truths, it’s nearly bewildering.

Despite the fact that First Aid Kit doesn't steer far away from the purity of acoustics and harmonies in the band's music, each of the songs has something special that’s dissimilar from the next. Their ambrosial Swedish accents shimmer through English words. They may be young, but their musical flair is for always infrangible.