This Airy, Lo-Fi Track Off The Latest EP From Skirts, Aka Alex Montenegro, Is Deceivingly Melancholic, And Comes As No Happy Accident.

Welcome to Song of the Day, where we hip you to all the new local releases you should be caring about. By highlighting one new North Texas-sprung tune every week day, our hope is that you’ll find something new to love about the rich and abundant DFW music scene five days a week.

skirts – “accident”
RIYL: Driving fast to cool your head… but not too fast. We don’t want you to get into a wreck.
What Else You Should Know: Earlier this year, we made mention of skirts, the solo project of singer-songwriter Alex Montenegro, in a Song of the Day piece for the song “Breather.” Since then, Montenegro has been expanding her profile in the local DIY circuit while working at Good Records, and to cap a rather eventful 2019, she released a follow-up to May’s Bus Dream EP with a follow-up EP that serves as a collection of demos titled abcdefg sides. (Get it? Because of B-sides?)

In a day and age in which lo-fi has become all the rage, even in genres like mainstream hip-hop, the lines between demos and proper releases are a bit blurred, and for Exhibit A, we present to you the EP’s opening track “accident.”

The song shows Montenegro singing rather morbid lyrics with a Kimya Dawson-esque inflection over a skeletal acoustic guitar instrumental. It sounds like something you would hear on Waxahatchee’s American Weekend, only Montenegro’s vocal style adheres more explicitly to the twee/C86 music that achieved a strong following in the U.K. and Olympia, Washington in the ‘80s. (Think bands like The Pastels, Talulah Gosh, The Vaselines, Beat Happening, etc.)

For a subgenre known for being so quaint, Montenegro’s lyrics are incredibly somber and heavy. In opening the song with the lyrics, “Cut off my finger, cause I couldn’t take the ring off,” one would guess it is about the end of a relationship, and with the subsequent passages, “Now I’m left here making excuses for the shit you do now” and “Pack up my belongings/I don’t want to stay around/Not sure what’s gotten into this town,” it may be an abusive one. Who knows? The beauty of music lies in the fact that you can derive your own meaning and apply it to your personal experiences — even if a song such as this ends with the line, “Driving fast to cool my head/I hope I get in an accident.”

We, for one, don’t hope for such fate, because skirts has been one of the most exciting local acts of 2019, and we need honest, barebones music like this in our lives.

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