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.
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