Grim Town

The pace drifts towards the second half, where the five-minute-long “Missed Calls” drags. But there’s no doubt this stop on Soak’s journey is one worth spending time at.

With its mix of catchy and moving songs, an artful structure, and a way with words, Grim Town delivers a piece of Zeitgeist as well as a solid set of tunes.

Grim Town does stretch on for a few minutes too long. But Monds-Watson still proves that the scenic route to adulthood is no less engaging--and certainly, that extra mile makes the humble closer "Nothing Looks the Same" all the more cathartic.

On this excellent record, she maps a route forward. [Jun 2019, p.109]

This ability to traverse a broad gamut of styles and emotions betrays a scope lacking on Before We Forgot How To Dream, with the artist evolving to incongruously couple shimmering charm with a fatalistic sense of reality. The interplay of frayed confessional tenacity with pristine production polish reinforces this ambiguity, a tension that secures this as a confident follow-up to an acclaimed 2015 breakthrough.

Grim Town makes growing up seem--well, grim--but Monds-Watson skillfully captures its bitter realities as well as the stirring memories that become life fuel.

SOAK’s honesty, combined with her considerable musical gifts, ensures that Grim Town is always a nice place to visit, even if you’d never want to live there.

Overall, and perhaps importantly, it mostly sounds like something to sing along to, rather than the soundtrack to your next existential crisis.

By way of tempering a general enthusiasm for the album as a whole, one might have some minor and ultimately inconsequential reservations about the tightness of some of the lyrics that still seem to have something of the quality of high-end journal entries. This is where we encounter the aforementioned growing pains that come with the maturation of a second album, although this is certainly more than mitigated by the quality of the vignettes and turns of phrase that appear elsewhere.

Grim Town is a concept in itself: it is a fictitious location, an embodiment of feeling that has been brought to life by the sentiment and memory that revolve around it. Through it, SOAK is able to explore emotion and turn it into something tangible.