SOAK earns a warm reception at the Echo

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SOAK at the Echo, by Carl Pocket

The Echo was bathed in cool on Monday night, and it wasn’t just the songs of 19-year-old Bridie Monds-Watson, who goes by the moniker SOAK.

||| Photos by Carl Pocket, courtesy of the Echo

“I’m from Ireland, where it’s hardly ever warmer than 20 [68 degrees in these parts],” said the native of Derry, Northern Ireland. “When we were sound-checking, we almost melted to the floor.” So the air conditioning was on, and it was with genuine concern that she asked whether everybody was comfortable with the room temperature.

It was fine, the crowd assured her, like many other moments in her chills-inducing set that covered nine songs, seven from her debut album “Before We Forgot How to Dream,” released in May via Rough Trade. Performing solo and alternating between electric and acoustic guitar, Monds-Watson displayed the cherub charisma that made her a hotly tipped artist in the U.K., yet the poise of someone beyond her years.

Monds-Watson sings innocently about the loss of innocence, her eyes closed and her guitar chords swathed with a light coat of reverb. So engaged was the Echo audience that you could hear the door rattle shut, and when a plastic glass clattered to the floor during “Blud” — a song, she explained, written at age 15 while she was eavesdropping on her quarreling parents — it threatened to ruin the moment. Unperturbed, she carried on: “You’ve got a problem / I cannot fix it / Hear the anger through the ceiling / I wish I missed it.”

All was not so serious, though, as Monds-Watson marveled at her first trip to Los Angeles and its highlights: Amoeba Records, pizza and warm weather. “I feel like Hannah Montana,” she joked, going on to admit that she once attended a Miley Cyrus concert and, well, witnessed “more don’ts than dos.”

The set peaked with the song “Sea Creatures,” which like last fall’s introductory single “B a noBody” casts the teenager as a sweet outsider listeners should be happy to let in. The past year has seen SOAK do everything from play Glastonbury to tour skate parks to cover St. Vincent’s “Digital Witness” for an iPhone commercial. Next time she ought to bring her full band for some record-shopping, pizza and warm weather.

L.A. duo Bouquet opened the evening.