First Aid Kit

The mainstream media is quite happy to fill your ears with distracting candy music day after day. But Edmonton’s seething underground scene is home to such a diversity of styles that it borders on insanity- punks and rudies rub shoulders with the rockers, skins and metalheads. Local band First Aid Kit embodies this collision of genres as fully as anyone- listen to their new disc, Songs of Warships, and you’ll hear muscular metal groove its way through punk-pop melodies, all dosed with a hefty sense of humour.

Percussionist Pablo Villa de Gasto says their grab-bag approach is based on an eclectic taste in music, not an attempt to please everyone. “I wouldn’t say it’s anything intentional to surf through the genres,” he says. “It just happens that way. For us, it’s just more interesting to play that way. You hear a lot of bands (where) every song sounds the same. We’ve got short attention spans.”

First Aid Kit-Villa de Gasto, bassist Sami Dee and guitarist/vocalists Pete Peeters and Natin Cowpuncher- have been around for more than a year, having risen from the ashes of Pawn. Their drive and camaraderie allowed them to quickly create a string of discs, starting with last year’s Mechanisms of Injury. Mechanisms and Songs were both recorded locally at Black Box Studios and released on the band’s own label, FAK Records.

“We’ve always been really into recording,’ says Villa de Gasto. “That’s a big part of it for us. We like to get stuff down on tape and get it out so you’ve got something to show for it. We’ve also always been in the frame of mind where once you record something you can move on to the next stuff. We’re constantly writing. So in order to move on, it’s like we have to get the stuff down.”
- VUE Weekly

Boasting an energy level not seen since the early days of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Jane’s Addiction and Fishbone, First Aid Kit (FAK to their fans) has scored a mighty winner with their second disc, Songs of Warships. The 10-track disc- with bits of noise inserted between the key songs- is a frenetic, multilayered grand experiment that gives the Edmonton music scene the kick in the ass it sorely needs. Listening to this disc is like entering a world created by William Gibson or Neal Stephenson: it seems familiar until the Mafia starts delivering the pizza. Don’t look for a signature sound from these guys; FAK lets it all hang out, bouncing through a mishmash of genres- rawk, hardcore, punk, reggae, country, hip-hop, jazz, metal, Middle Eastern, stand-up comedy and all the other appliances in the kitchen. But in the end, they establish their own space in the musical spectrum, unlike other bands who will beat a sound to death in order to define their genre. Songs of Warships is loopy and goofy, sardonic and brilliant.
- VUE Weekly

First Aid Kit have flown under Vue’s radar until now; they seemed to simply emerge from nowhere with all the right elements of a successful band, including a crowd-pleasing joker of a frontman with the pipes and moves to get the crowd shaking. Straightforward heavy rock with a hip-hop twist. Vue likes it.
- VUE Weekly