{"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 – ‘Special Leave’<\/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 ‘relief’ 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’s 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 ‘Special Leave’, and ‘Cab Driver’, which finds Bell dwelling over the phrase ‘The cab driver’s scanning my face’ following a ‘perfectly normal, wordless exchange’ which ‘slipped eventually into this thing about camaraderie, loneliness, iteration and uncertainty’<\/a>.<\/p>\n

A dial tone, a military drum roll, and a lone dense thud hollowly reverberating – sounds which seem to imply but exist outside the presence of people – lead us in turn into ‘Special Leave’, a song which Bell has described as about wars and tours, and ‘how two fundamentally inverse-feeling beats coexist’ and colour a shared melody.\u00a0‘When I get home I want you to be waiting at the door’, 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, ‘Yeah I’m broken, don’t you doubt it’.<\/p>\n