{"id":13990,"date":"2017-08-01T12:33:27","date_gmt":"2017-08-01T11:33:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/culturedarm.com\/?p=13990"},"modified":"2017-08-03T22:26:42","modified_gmt":"2017-08-03T21:26:42","slug":"culturedarms-songs-of-the-month-july-2017","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/culturedarm.com\/staging\/5793\/culturedarms-songs-of-the-month-july-2017\/","title":{"rendered":"Culturedarm’s Songs of the Month (July 2017)"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Olga Bell \u2013 \u2018Special Leave\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n

Service members in the United States military can\u00a0accrue special leave for serving in hostile environments for extended periods. If they spend a continuous period of at least 120 days in situations which expose them to the threat of imminent danger, they can accumulate and retain up to 120 days of leave by adding their ordinary leave to their special leave allowance. Intended to provide \u2018relief\u2019 for spells of lengthy and stressful deployment, special leave is therefore pitched somewhere between a necessity and a thank you.<\/p>\n

For the Fourth of July, Olga Bell<\/a> released a surprise EP entitled America<\/em> on One Little Indian. A companion piece to last year\u2019s Tempo<\/em>, it features two variations on the anxiety-ridden elegy of a title track, in the form of an instrumental and a swirling remix by Kahn, the new song \u2018Special Leave\u2019, and \u2018Cab Driver\u2019, which finds Bell dwelling over the phrase \u2018The cab driver\u2019s scanning my face\u2019 following a \u2018perfectly normal, wordless exchange\u2019 which \u2018slipped eventually into this thing about camaraderie, loneliness, iteration and uncertainty\u2019<\/a>.<\/p>\n

A dial tone, a military drum roll, and a lone dense thud hollowly reverberating \u2013 sounds which seem to imply but exist outside the presence of people \u2013 lead us in turn into \u2018Special Leave\u2019, a song which Bell has described as about wars and tours, and \u2018how two fundamentally inverse-feeling beats coexist\u2019 and colour a shared melody.\u00a0\u2018When I get home I want you to be waiting at the door\u2019, Bell uneasily intones, as synthetic and space-oriented squiggles and blips contrast with more organic and domestic sounds like rattles and light rapping on wood or plastic. Before a shuffling drum pattern takes up the theme, the sense is of an artless recollection of foreign sands and boundless oceans, a feeling which blends seamlessly with disquiet over the future. The idea of needing someone, of loving someone remains, but with a caveat, \u2018Yeah I\u2019m broken, don\u2019t you doubt it\u2019.<\/p>\n