Courtesy of Double Double Whammy
There are debut albums that announce a supreme level of confidence and craftsmanship: the Beatles’ Please Please Me, out in 1963, or Television’s Marquee Moon, out in 1977. Great Big Wild Oak, the first album from Skirts, is less an announcement than a gathering and aggregation of musical notions.
At the loose center of the bundle is singer-songwriter Alex Montenegro. Growing up in Dallas and then maturing amid Texas indie-rock scenes, Montenegro started Skirts as a home-recording project. Despite having toured since that start (two members of her touring band contribute here), she still often sings as if she’s at home. At night.
Sometimes, her voice’s resemblance to the blossoming of a nocturnal flower—an evening-scented stock, nothing more exotic—suggests an insubstantiality to dream-hazed tracks like “Dayspell” or “Annie,” the latter a 67-second closer with the fragmentary scratchiness of many a Guided by Voices composition, albeit prettier.
Montenegro is very capable of musical focus, though, and a song like “Always,” with its chiming guitars, New Goth groove, and shy romanticism, is a warm and welcome nod to moody female-fronted rock a la Lush and Mazzy Star.
She also complicates the arrangements in ways that are usually not initially apparent: “Remember” feels ready to pace itself as a bedroom-folk song until plucked and picked guitars roll over one another like new lovers trying to find out if and how each other dances, while “True” develops a twangy subtheme into the waltzing honky-tonk heart of the matter.
The pedal steel that rises within “True” is among an array of intelligently employed instrumental touches—an echoing banjo in “Sapling,” a hesitant duet between piano and bass on “Swim”—that indicate a wider range into which Skirts might expand. Great Big Wild Oak is not nearly so big as its title, but Montenegro’s ready to grow.
