Monday Music: The Girls Are in Trouble, but Not This Album
Image by Courtesy of JDub Records
It is hard to believe we are only five years from klezmer-punk band Golem’s 2006 debut album, “Fresh Off Boat,” and the first time (most of us) heard Alicia Jo Rabins on a record. Since then we have gotten a follow-up from Golem (2009’s tremendous “Citizen Boris”) and a solo debut from Rabin’s new project, Girls in Trouble.
Now, in 2011, Rabins has released her own solo sophomore album, “Half You Half Me,” putting herself in contention for the most prolific Jewish artist of the last few years. Moreover, “Half You Half Me,” out this week on JDub records, escapes the fate of many album follow-ups. Instead of a collection of hastily thrown together songs in the wake of a debut success, the album is a carefully written, confident set of songs that pushes the Girls in Trouble project forward and almost alleviates the pain of going two years without a new Golem album.
“Half You Half Me’s” album title suggests a figure divided, and that motif is developed on the opening track, “We Are Androgynous.” The track opens with a light, poppy riff that sounds like fellow chanteuse Neko Case, and Rabins’s voice singing “We are androgynous, doubly faced beings / One looking forward and one looking back.” Rabins’s voice is anything but androgynous, though. She sings with a light, almost delicate register that is decisively feminine. The androgyny may be a product of the album’s ambitions — each song supposedly tells the first-person account of a Biblical woman. Those references are obscure, though, and the album falls somewhere between the explicit narratives of the Biblical heroines of Galeet Dardashti’s “The Naming” and the primordial unnamed female matriarchs of Charming Hostess’s recent “The Bowls Project.”
Listen to ‘We are Androgynous’:
Outside some resonant lyrics, though, the conceit is incidental. The album soars when the protagonist is indefinite or simply Rabins herself. They are not carrying out revolutions or secret mystical histories. The most beautiful moments on the album come when Rabins notices something obscure, or outlines something beautiful. On “Lemon” she sings, “I kept on cutting till I started to see blood.” That’s a good description for this set of songs. They start off mundane, but she cuts into them until something pretty bleeds out.
Watch Girls in Trouble play in Toronto in 2010:
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and the protests on college campuses.
Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.
Make a gift of any size and become a Forward member today. You’ll support our mission to tell the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
