"The teenage heart is an unguided dart," sings the 18-year-old Irish singer-songwriter Bridie Monds-Watson in the first line of the first album she's released as SOAK. "We're trying hard to make something of what we are." It's both an introductory passage to Before We Forgot How to Dream and a mission statement for the work. Throughout the LP, SOAK revels in her own uncertainty, basking in the openness of her future. Sometimes her music's meandering quality gives it a wistful charm, but sometimes it just drifts.
Unlike the woodsy, barebones EPs that preceded it, Dream comes padded with airy production. Behind Monds-Watson's guitar and voice, cymbals, strings, and bright spats of piano crash together. Sometimes they add an uptempo kick to songs that can't quite support the speed, like the pounding "Garden", whose melodies and lyrics don't move nearly as fast as its drum beats. "I'd take you everywhere if I could/ I'd waste all my time on you," SOAK sings, and while the instrumentation's anxiety rakes against the words, it's not enough of an irony to drag them out of cliche.
When the ornamentation falls back into the mist, the idiosyncrasies of Monds-Watson's voice emerge more clearly. One of the album's most haunted and tender moments, "24 Windowed House" holds off on the bombast until the last possible moment. The song cracks open, and giant cymbal crashes underscore SOAK's uneasy lyrics. "I am afraid of sleep," she sings. On "SHUVELS", her voice doubles over itself in a queasy echo as she pleads, "If you're not around now/ Where do I go instead?" The song doesn't let that final question hang, though; Monds-Watson's guitar and a slate of flutes come to rest on a major chord, taking the edge off her ennui.
There seem to be so many questions stirring inside SOAK, and yet Before We Forgot How to Dream douses them in so much prettiness that they lose their spark. It's a polished debut, but what's most interesting about it lurks beneath that shine. Monds-Watson writes like she's ready to fall in love and get her heart broken a hundred times over—like she's hungry to feel everything the way a lot of 18-year-olds are hungry to feel everything. "When you're young and reckless/ You should not be stopped," she sings on "Reckless Behaviour". That recklessness lies inside Before We Forgot How to Dream, but it takes a little squinting to glimpse.
