Indie Pop Meets Midrash With ‘Girls in Trouble’
The Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Living Memorial to the Holocaust recently announced the line-up for their annual New York’s Best Emerging Jewish Artists Showcase next month, and Alicia Jo Rabins’s new art pop band, Girls in Trouble, is among the performers.
The group, which started playing shows in October and made it to South by Southwest this year, performs songs based on tragic stories of forgotten women of the bible. Rumor has it that Rabins (a violinist extraordinaire and member the klezmer punk group Golem) was looking to avoid writing a thesis for her masters in theology, so she composed a song cycle instead. That project eventually grew into the band.
Clear, lilting vocals, haunting harmonies, driving strings and rolling rhythms are what I heard on the group’s MySpace page. Girls in Trouble could certainly be described as indie-meets-midrash, but I didn’t feel like the sounds of the shtetl were being forced down my throat (which is definitely the case with many of the self-identified Jewish bands on the scene these days). I’m looking forward to hearing more from them.
The Showcase is scheduled for June 17.
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
