JDub Records

PopMatters is running a great Girls in Trouble review!  You can read that HERE.  Full text below the cut.

“Girls in Trouble’s simple, folk instrumentation is ripe with influences from around the world, including Jewish and even Venetian-sounding tapestries of sonic bliss.”

8/10 - Lana Cooper

The premise behind Girls in Trouble’s self-titled release is straight out of those “what if” comic books from back in the day with a religious twist. Helmed by singer/songwriter/violinist/guitarist Alicia Jo Rabbins, the band brands itself on this ten-song album as what would happen if the women of the Bible got together and started an indie rock band. Each song takes a different Old Testament tale with a female protagonist and turns it into a kicky neo-folk ditty. Girls in Trouble’s simple, folk instrumentation is ripe with influences from around the world, including Jewish and even Venetian-sounding tapestries of sonic bliss. (Check out the gorgeous violin solo on “Hunter/The Bee Lays Her Honey” for a prime example.)

If you didn’t know the album’s underlying concept, the themes aren’t obvious, making the disc enjoyable in a (mostly) secular sort of way, too. The beautiful, tinkling “Snow/Scorpions and Spiders” is one of the only pieces that it’s obvious which Biblical babe the song is about, focusing on Miriam, the sister of Moses. Most of the disc’s other pieces tell the tales of more obscure women of the Torah, such as the maudlin “Mountain/When My Father Came Back” about Jephthah’s daughter—which shares sacrificial similarities to the story of Abraham and Isaac minus the happy ending. Overall, Girls in Trouble puts a fresh twist on ancient stories, as well as folk music in general.

Girls in Trouble’s Alicia Jo Rabins is once again over on lit-minded blog Largehearted Boy, this time in conversation with author Sana Krasikov (One More Year).  You can find that HERE, though I have included full-text below the cut.  Enjoy!

Sana Krasikov: Alicia, when I was listening to your album, what came through the loudest for me was a sad, sweet Irish Ballad sound. Your violin playing and singing feels very much in the grain of the Irish Bard tradition. Can you talk a bit about that – has Irish music been an influence for you. Do you think there are parallels between Irish storytelling and Jewish storytelling?

Alicia Jo Rabins: Definitely. The Irish and the Jews have a lot in common - as James Joyce pointed out. Perhaps not coincidentally, Joyce is one of my favorite writers and Ulysses, as a modern Irish interpretation of The Odyssey , was a major inspiration as I was writing these songs interpreting Torah stories about women through a contemporary American voice. And musically, absolutely - I play a lot of traditional Appalachian fiddle music which has its roots in Ireland and England, and I’ve been profoundly influenced by the simplicity and depth of those songs and fiddle tunes. I love the way old Irish and Appalachian murder ballads tell these gruesome stories which somehow feel so good to sing - good enough to be passed down through generations, kind of like these Torah stories about betrayal and exile and love and leprosy.

Was music always in the background at your house when you were kid growing up in the Baltimore suburbs? What do you remember your parents listening to?

I started playing violin when I was three years old, and so did my two younger sisters, so there were always a lot of squeaky little violin noises around, and a lot of basic classical repertoire that got more complex as we grew up. My parents listened to classical music, but I didn’t like a lot of it because it was too intense - I used to come downstairs and ask them to turn off the scary music (usually Beethoven.) I didn’t know pop music existed until I turned thirteen, at which point I started listening obsessively to top-40 radio for about a year, but pretty soon after I got into local bands and the whole DIY scene and stopped listening to mainstream radio. So I kind of missed out on pop music the first time around, and I’m still filling in the gaps, which leads to some unusual choices of van listening on tour.

You played for cash in bars when you lived in Jerusalem, right? How was the rock scene in Israel different from the rock scene here?

I lived this weird life for two years where I was basically a Jewish monk during the day - studying ancient texts in Aramaic and Hebrew, chanting prayers, saying blessings - and then at night I would go out and play bluegrass and rock music in clubs. But I can’t really speak to the scene in general; mine was a pretty unique experience. I will say, speaking of the Israeli scene, that I’ve been to some Monotonix shows here in the States over the last year and they have blown my mind. If they’re any representation, the rock scene there is insane.

One reason I wanted to hear your album was that, while I was living in Moscow, my friend Nadya and I had this Torah study group going where we got a bunch of young women — Russian, American, Israeli, Jewish, Christian, agnostic — to all get together Tuesday nights and read stories and commentaries about the matriarchs. One forgets how packed with drama the bible is and how its stories rarely lead you to simple conclusions about God or human nature. I remember when we read about Tamar and Chana – who felt like these underdogs who were being treated as though they were crazy or drunk (in Chana’s case), and as a result felt abandoned by God. And yet, when they were proven right (or righteous), their role in the story in the story seemed to be to shed light on some patriarchal errors or hubris. Almost like a corrective force. I wonder if that’s a theme you picked up from reading these stories as well, since you seem to explore it in your songs.

Wow, that group sounds amazing. Sometimes it seems so rare that people actually sit down and read the Torah or the Bible or whatever, instead of just assuming they know what’s in it. It’s actually great literature with all these shocking stories about humans and what we do to each other. That’s deinitely a large part of the inspiration for this project - bringing the dark, twisted, human stories out. Not just to shock people, but to contextualize all the darkness we see around us - that it’s human darkness and not, actually, essentially modern. And at the same time those situations give us the opportunity to make brave and creative decisions - to use whatever tools we have to make things work, whether it’s our intelligence or even just our vulnerability. I do sense a kind of proto-feminist awareness in some of those stories like Tamar and Chana, where men who are overly confident in their power are schooled about justice, karma and love by resourceful women. And then there’s Bat Yiftach (the story behind “Mountain”) which is just kind of heartbreaking and ends in death.

If you were to drive for six hours straight, say from New York to North Carolina, what music would you take along for the car ride?

Funny you should ask, because I’m answering these questions on tour in North Carolina. We’ve been listening to a lot of Brian Eno, to Micachu and the Shapes, to Gladys Knight, Nina Nastasia, and to Elton John (not because anyone is into Elton John but because I’ve never really heard him - see #2). And somewhere in the back of my mind I’m always listening to Leonard Cohen on repeat.

Because of the album’s title, I can’t help but ask: tell me about a time in your life when you were most in trouble.

I tutor bat mitzvah students, and if I answered that question honestly, their parents would all probably fire me immediately.

On your Myspace page, under “genre” you wrote “psych folk”. Can you talk about what that means to you?

I don’t take genre descriptions very seriously, and I don’t really know what “psych folk” means. But I’m deeply influenced by traditional American folk music, yet also interested in expanding that sensibility and bringing it into realms that are far from strict folk music - violin looping, for example, or weird literary influences - so I figured psych folk was as good a way as any to describe that.

Your husband Aaron was one of the collaborators on this solo album. What’s the give-and-take like when you produce music together?

We got engaged between recording and mixing the album, and got married a few weeks before it came out, so this record has a lot of love in it. As an artist, Aaron’s great to collaborate with because we come from such different places, musically speaking - I’m from this classical and folk/traditional music background, and he’s lived for years in Olympia and Portland, and has toured the world for years playing weird shamanistic punk music with Old Time Relijun, plus he knows a ton about rock history which I don’t. I wrote all the songs, but we would brainstorm together about arrangements and production - we’d stay up late playing each other obscure stuff from each of our record collections, and pushing the songs in different directions, and I think you can hear some of that reflected in the songs. The other musicians on the record, Tim Monaghan (drums) and Jascha Hoffman (keyboards) are also also close friends, so Aaron and I would bring our ideas to practice and then the final arrangements are the product of all four of us trying different things out together and seeing what works. It’s a solo album in a way, but it also turned into a band of sorts.

In high school, my friends and I played this game called, “Sleep with, Live with, Throw off a Cliff.” If you were to choose three characters from your songs – whom would you sleep with, live with, and throw off a cliff?

Oh boy. I have to say, of all the interviews I’ve done you are the first one who’s asked which Bible character I would sleep with!

I can’t answer that. It would make all the other characters too jealous. But I will say this: on the album, Tamar gets slept with; Ruth gets lived with; and Bat Yiftach gets sacrificed. But not by me.

Well, we’re back from vacation, and it’s time to catch you all up on what you might have missed over the break.  Here ya’ go:

• The Faster Times included The Sway Machinery and Girls in Trouble in their Best of 2009 Music list.

• The Boston Survival Guide chose Girls in Trouble to include in their 2009 Band Roundup.

• Made Up Disease (MUD) posted a really nice and very thorough ode to JDub, including a whole bunch of our artists, like The Macaroons and Balkan Beat Box.

• Music magazine Blurt included Alicia of Girls in Trouble in their The Artists Have Spoken: Best of 2009 feature.

• JTA’s The Fundermentalist shed a little light on the recent Jdub/Nextbook partnership.

• The Forward listed Soulico and The Sway Machinery as picks on their 2009 Forward Fives list.

• The University of Oregon’s Oregon Voice had a great writeup on Soulico’s Exotic on the Speaker.

• DJ Anjali listed Soulico’s Exotic on the Speaker as part of his Top 5 of 2009 in the Portland Mercury.

• Digital City has a fantastic interview with Dave Schneider of The Macaroons — conducted by Corn Mo’!

• The Sway Machinery is one of LimeWire’s Best of 2009 Staff Picks!

• Jeremiah Lockwood, of The Sway Machinery, published an op-ed in The Forward about the band’s trip to Mali.

• Contrarian Media picked Golem’s Fresh Off Boat as a Best of the Waughts disc.

• Our friends over at Tablet Mag talk up The Macaroons in a podcast dedicated to the best family-friendly music of 2009.

• New York Times‘ Urban Eye listed Jewltide as one of their Christmas Eve picks.

Last but not least, I’ve posted more photos from Jewltide 7 under the cut!  All credit goes to Dan Sieradski.

The Hanukkah videos continue this week with a rendition of ”Hanukkah, Oh Hanukkah” by Girls In Trouble.

Girls In Trouble’s debut CD is available in the JDub store.

Yesterday, JDub, The Sway Machinery and Girls in Trouble all got some great mentions in The New York Times’ T Magazine blog.  You can check that entire article, “Not Your Bubby’s Hanukkah Music”, out HERE.  Full text is also included after the jump.

“Alicia Jo Rabins’s tender version of the “other” dreidel song “Sivivon Sov Sov Sov” should be a Hanukkah standard. Her plucked violin and gorgeous voice could be a Jewish “Silent Night.” “The great thing is that even Hanukkah songs are in minor keys,” says Rabins, “which makes it easy to cover them with a creepy twist.” Rabins also plays in the great klezmer punk band Golem and has her own project, Girls in Trouble, which chronicles women in the Old Testament.”

Hanukkah, the ancient festival of lights, is upon us. The holiday is synonymous with many things, including sublime greasy food (latkes and jelly doughnuts) and long-suffering parents trying to explain to their children why the gift largess pales in comparison to Christmas — despite the holiday’s eight-night span. Musically, Hanukkah is best known for the Dreidel Song (“Dreidel, dreidel, dreidel / I made it of clay”) and Adam Sandler’s spoken-word opus (recently covered by Neil Diamond). This year Senator Orrin Hatch, Republican of Utah, tried to enter the pantheon with a “gift” to the Jewish people. Like all good presents, it’s one we never knew we wanted.

Far from the Beltway, though, a new Jewish music scene has been steadily building in New York City. “Hanukkah music had no effect on me,” says the musician Matisyahu, who grew up in a reconstructionist synagogue before becoming Orthodox and moving to Crown Heights, Brooklyn. The spiritual singer, currently playing an eight-night stint at Webster Hall and the Music Hall of Williamsburg, combines Jamaican dancehall with Jewish religious philosophy on his new album, “Light” (Epic). “Despite the disco ball dreidel,” he says, referring to the show’s lighting prop, “music is not about a party for me, it’s about trying to communicate ideas.”

Alicia Jo Rabins’s tender version of the “other” dreidel song “Sivivon Sov Sov Sov” should be a Hanukkah standard. Her plucked violin and gorgeous voice could be a Jewish “Silent Night.” “The great thing is that even Hanukkah songs are in minor keys,” says Rabins, “which makes it easy to cover them with a creepy twist.” Rabins also plays in the great klezmer punk band Golem and has her own project, Girls in Trouble, which chronicles women in the Old Testament.

Rabins records for the New York-based label JDub, whose roster includes Sway Machinery, a band that played a Hanukkah show Saturday night at the Sixth Street Community Synagogue. The group, with its ferocious five-piece horn section, tore the roof off the sanctuary (metaphorically) and blew the sound system (literally). Led by the guitarist Jeremiah Lockwood, the band combines ancient Jewish cantorial singing traditions with blistering rock and jazz. The lineup reads like indie rock royalty, with the drummer Brian Chase of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Colin Stetson of Arcade Fire and Tom Waits’s band, and Jordan McLean and Stuart Bogie of Antibalas.

Finally, Gods of Fire is the answer to the oft-asked question “Where do I find some Hanukkah-themed heavy metal?” It’s hard to imagine any of the band’s serrating anthems becoming holiday standards anytime soon — or anytime, for that matter — but if nothing else it’s one less time you have to hear about a dreidel made of clay.

A good place to learn about New York City’s new Jewish music scene are the music labels J-Dub Records, Shemspeed and Tzadik (John Zorn’s label). This week the Shemspeed label is producing its fifth annual Sephardic Music Festival at venues around the city including the new 92nd Street Y in Tribeca, Joe’s Pub, and the Knitting Factory, featuring artists like Galeet Dardashti, Pharaoh’s Daughter and Matisyahu.