Gina Birch
Trouble
THIRD MAN
Nearly 50 years after co-founding The Raincoats as an experimental, DIY/poli-sci outfit designed to shatter the misogyny behind the burgeoning punk scene (to say nothing of their roles as harbingers of the lo-fi movement), British bassist-composer Gina Birch is still doing all of the above, only with more volume. If you loved Birch’s first solo single, “Feminist Song,” from her 2023 debut effort I Play My Bass Loud, you already know that she’s not here to move her needle beyond the heated debates of The Raincoats’ usual defiance of easy categorization and vanilla rhetoric. Trouble, then, moves farther and faster into Birch’s unsteadying melodic mix of skanking dub-rock, skunked neo-jazz, skeletal R&B, and cosmic space-pop with fluid, multi-tracked rhythm and big harmonic vocal backgrounds that never exactly fit with their music. Perfect.
The eerily angelic, Bond-like theme music of “I Thought I’d Live Forever” and the bassoon-y raga of “Happiness” start the album with what sounds like a many-headed hydra of singing, cooing, nattering Birches vocalizing as one weird barbershop quartet. A spiky, pot-rattling Birch, in a lower voice, turns “Causing Trouble Again” into a mean, edgy, femme-empowered lullaby with two slightly off-key grooves working at once and a handful of iconic female artists’ names (Maya Deren, Andrea Dworkin, Grace Jones) announced near the racing track’s finish line. “Cello Song” opens as just that—a stately, slowed-to-a-spin Birch rhapsodizing to the accompaniment of a chamber classical elegy—until a squealing, scrawling guitar and a mad tale about blood, flashbulbs, and Russian roulette unfolds behind its sawed strings.
While “Keep to the Left” and “Doom Monger” cloudily lilt along with the dreamy inspiration of dub god Augustus Pablo in their mix, the uneasy echo tech of “Sleep” and anti-Gregorian chants of “Hey Hey” are like no obsessive love songs before them. Gina Birch has never been about finding creature comfort in her music, and she’s not about to start with Trouble.
