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Song of the day – 405: Girls In Trouble

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Foxes!, two-year-old Daniel exclaims, his face breaking into a smile.

Foxes?

“Foxes!”

Ah yes. Foxes. The first song on Half You Half Me, the second album from Girls In Trouble, features the same sort of plucked violin strings (might be mandolin, might be guitar) that occurs during certain scenes in Wes Anderson’s inspired adaption of Fantastic Mr. Fox. Although the plucking is left as stark musical illustration during the movie, and doesn’t have swathes of sweeping string accompaniment swooping in for emphasis, nor a gentle in-tune, vaguely choral, female voice that tells of … damn, I don’t know. Androgyny. Bear hunting. The removal of desire to life in any place except the Pacific Northwest of America. A fondness for early 90s recordings of Le Mystere Des Voix Bulgares. Tea drinking.

Or, as the tag list puts it on their Bandcamp page:

alicia jo rabins art pop biblical girls in trouble j dub jdub k k records indie-folk post-biblical art-pop song cycle Brooklyn

I can’t find a link to a video for a song from the second album, but this is lovely.

Ah. I’ve checked back to the email from band-member Aaron Hartman (ex-IQU and Old Time Relijun, both bands I liked and both bands who sounded nothing like Girls In Trouble).  Let me quote it, because it’s interesting and I have a loathing of paraphrasing that stems deep from years of doing same:

The bandleader/ songwriter, Alicia Jo Rabins, is a bibical scholar, poet, and violinist. The songs are all based on different women from the Old Testament. She takes a literary-feminist approach to these stories. We are not secretly religious, but when smart-asses challenge her on the texts, Alicia can quote Aramaic back in their faces. She plays all the string parts on both of our records.

This is super different than Old Time Relijun. What we share with OTR is the fact that we are not riding on any sort of musical trend and we’re building this thing on our own. We play a lot of living rooms, using my home stereo as our p.a. system.

Yeah, it’s got the same solemnity as … look, I don’t want to start listing a couple of bands I’ve heard in the last couple of years because that devalues both those bands and this by easy free association … someone like The Carter Family, but that’s for the (not harsh at all) restraint and poise offered, not for the voice. Songs are special because they’re treated like they’re special.

“Hauntingly lovely,” reckons LA Weekly. Who am I to argue with such august praise?

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