Before Bridie Monds-Watson’s second album properly gets under way, it is anxious to police its potential listenership. Opening with an ominous train announcement welcoming passengers on board a service to the titular locale, it warns that those who are “unmedicated and have salaries or pension plans should vacate the carriage immediately”. This is a journey for the “the lonely, the disenfranchised, the disillusioned, the lost”.
As introductions go, it’s a crude and largely needless one. Once Grim Town kicks into gear, it quickly becomes clear that the Derry-born musician is appealing to those familiar with the frightening disorientation that accompanies psychological distress (something even those with reliable pay packets have been known to experience). “How can I be home and still want to go there?” asks the 22-year-old on I Was Blue, Technicolour Too, with a deftness of expression that belies her years, while on Fall Asleep / Backseat she is “terrified that I’d forgot how to smile”.
Perhaps the clunky signposting stems from concerns that Grim Town’s sonic palette might see it mistaken for something more jolly. Monds-Watson’s moniker may bring to mind soul and folk, but here the musician positions herself firmly in the indie tradition: Grim Town is a place where despondency, bathos and existential angst are transmogrified into beauty and joy via the magic of a winsome chorus and jangly guitars. In fact, rather than channelling a specific aspect of the genre, Monds-Watson manages to conjure a kind of infinitely appealing ur-indie – fashioned from gleaming riffs, chugging percussion and a fluty falsetto – that recalls everyone from the Cure to Coldplay.
Unsurprisingly, it’s a mode that often produces tracks that feel maddeningly familiar – Maybe and Everybody Loves You in particular prompt a sense of deja vu that can be difficult to move beyond. It also renders Grim Town a decidedly less modern record than Monds-Watson’s 2015 Mercury-nominated debut Before We Forgot How to Dream, which featured a series of sparse, restrained dirges. Yet there’s no doubt this is an album that benefits from employing a tried-and-tested formula – not least because it carries with it the precious and generally life-affirming ability to excavate pleasure from pain.
