Tonight: First Aid Kit & Julia Jacklin at WOMH

We’re headed face-first a hell of a busy week, music-wise, and I’m honestly feeling kinda frantic, not wanting to let any of it slip by (even though, yes, I almost certainly will…).

One of the coolest shows is happening tonight, though, Monday, September 17th, up at White Oak Music Hall, where First Aid Kit and Julia Jacklin will both be playing.

Headliners First Aid Kit are particularly cool, to me — I stumbled across them completely by accident via the video for “Fireworks,” and I’ve been enthralled pretty much completely since. Despite hailing from the outskirts of Stockholm, sisters Johanna and Klara Söderberg sound like they could be coming to you straight from a holler deep in the Appalachians, someplace where the sun comes up at about 10AM, as the song goes.

It’s mostly their voices that give me that feeling, admittedly, just that nice warble and solemn, sweet gravitas they both bring to the music. On this year’s Ruins, at least, the music itself goes further afield, bringing in elements of more contemporary folk like Fleet Foxes or even the more baroque stylings of people like The Decemberists and marrying those sounds to torch song arrangements and retro-girl-group pop. It’s lush and warm and down-to-earth and gorgeous, and I can’t stop listening, dammit.

But you shouldn’t listen to me; listen to (and watch) this, instead:

Then there’s opener Julia Jacklin, who’s Australian but sounds at first listen as if she could very well be kin to the sisters Söderberg. Actually, I take that back — her songs on 2016’s Don’t Let The Kids Win is backwoodsy-sounding and folky, but it’s got less of the shimmery, pretty sheen that First Aid Kit crafts so well, instead bringing to mind more bleak-minded folk artists, people like Julien Baker or Kelli Scarr.

The songs don’t roll along so much as stagger and stumble, drunkenly fumbling their way back home down a darkened path through the woods to the front door, only to collapse on the floor right at your feet. That’s not to say that they’re not good, mind you — Don’t Let the Kids Win is a stellar album, no doubt — but just that they’re a different sort of animal from First Aid Kit’s songs.

And hey, here’s a video for Jacklin’s “Pool Party,” which I think weirdly demonstrates both the similarities and the differences:

Anyway, that’s what I think you ought to be doing tonight, right there. Hell, it’s what I would be doing if I hadn’t exhausted myself over the weekend (and, well, if I didn’t have to go to a Cub Scout thing tonight, too). Get on out there…