Girls In Trouble

I was reading over Matthue Roth's "Jewish Music Lyrics: The Best of 2009 over on My Jewish Learning this morning. As to be expected, it's a great list though not quite what I would have put together. Maybe I'll do one of my own. The big surprise was that I had entirely missed one of the artists on Roth's list. I don't mean I didn't blog about it. I mean I had missed the band altogether. And they're fantastic. I'm slipping.

The band that caught me off guard is "Girls in Trouble," a new project by Alicia Jo Rabins of the punk-klezmer band Golem. In addition to loving the theatrical folk-pop music, I'm blown away by the lyrical depth of the project. For the Girls in Trouble oeuvre, Rabins took on nothing less than the neglected and often misunderstood stories of women in the Torah. Particularly ones in crisis. While I haven't heard the whole album through yet (I just downloaded from eMusic), the tracks on the Girls in Trouble myspace page captivating. They put the listener right into the, typically traumatic, experience from the female protagonists point of view. It's a wonderful and insightful strategy. I have a feeling this disk will be in rotation for a while.

The sound quality on the video isn't up to the studio quality tracks you can hear on their MySpace page, but it's a great introduction. Here's Girls in Trouble at their JDub album release party at Public Assembly in Brooklyn 11/11/09.

Girls in Trouble "Mountain"