First Aid Kit / Kimberly Anne @ Usher Hall, 19 January

“You guys are awesome!” She’s being nice; we’re not. This Usher Hall audience is January-cold, and tonight’s support – the sweet, punkish, south Londoner Kimberly Anne – has her work cut out for her. Luckily, it doesn’t take long to win us over. With just a guitar and her toasty vocal she’s warm and engaging; by the time she’s live-looping drums we’re all singing along. Later, she gives out teabags in the foyer, each with a free download code. Lovely.

Consider us warmed up: the venue can barely hold us all, excitement chokes the air. When Swedish folkstress duo First Aid Kit finally glimmer on stage, we are transported. Gone is the Edinburgh chill and the ornate theatre cornicing; instead, near-dusk sunlight pierces the barn planks behind the band as 2012 hit The Lion’s Roar takes us away.

To those unfamiliar with these sisters’ dazzling work, Johanna and Klara Söderberg are country wunderkinds with 3 albums to date, sung in gorgeously melancholic, American-accented two-part harmonies. But for all the sad lyricism, tonight they’re swigging Irn Bru (“Sugar free, I’m diabetic”) and poking fun at their own occasional dourness (“party anthems!”). Hell, they even cover a verse of Seven Nation Army before launching into Love Interruption by Jack White.

Even with a devastating rendition of To A Poet (penned by Klara when she was 17, apparently), and a hotly demanded encore (in which they cover Simon & Garfunkel’s America, before closing with, of course, the mighty Emmylou), the stand-out moment above all is the mic-less, amp-less serenity of Ghost Town. The crowd is reverently hushed, not a smartphone in sight; when they start singing along, it is halcyonic. [George Sully]