Power in The Blood

Wednesday night at the Danforth Music Hall, a music venue painted a pale blue with fresco decorations, saw the young Swedish sisters Johanna and Klara of First Aid Kit making an appearance in Toronto. It had excellent light and sound, speakers along the stage for the front row and line array speakers for the back. But the 400-or-so crowd only filled half of the cavernous space.

First up was Dylan Leblanc, a singer from Louisiana who didn't connect much with the audience, though they were generously prepared to support him. His high voice with slurred vowels, like a hipster Kermit, made his lyrics unintelligible. And his sketchy stories, whether it was an ex-girlfriend who left him because of his drinking or his coke-dealing "only black guy I know", didn't make him very sympathetic.

Dressed like hippie Amish in big flowy ankle-length dresses patterned with muted fractals, the sisters started the show with In The Morning. The a capella sections of the song showcased their greatest strength: the intertwining harmonies of their vocals. But the next two, Blue and Hard Believer, also showed their drawback: anemic folk pop arrangements. Case in point: twice in the evening, I thought they were continuing a song interrupted by the crowd's enthusiastic clapping; it turns out they were starting a new song.

They fared best on simpler arrangements which let their rich voices fill the room: New Year's Eve with guitar and auto-harp, and the unamplified Ghost Town. The lyrics didn't have quite the emotional heft of their cover of Paul Simon's America during the encore, but then they are only 22 and 20 years-old.

It was a fun show with sing-a-longs like Emmylou but hopefully they will have more performances like the set's closer Lion's Roar, where Johanna and Klara abandoned themselves to the music and flung their hair about in rippling waves. Sometimes you have to bleed a little to show that you're alive.