"In The Darkness" by Ollie Bond
Review
Ollie Bond is one of those talented artists who seems capable of swerving the "quality/quantity" debut by releasing very high quality singles at a rate which can be tagged as "prolific. Thus we have the follow up today to December's "We Still Have Next Year" , namely "In The Darkness": though the gap of just over two months is somewhat longer than the previous one of only three weeks between "Ready" and the former.
If "We Still Have Next Year" was a fairly optimistic look forwards, "In The Darkness" is a much more sombre affair (the title has probably already tipped you off to that). Taken at a more stately pace than any of Ollie's more recent songs, it allows him to stretch out the words in his lyrics as well as use space between them to good effect: which is an effective showcase for aspects of his vocal abilities not necessarily captured fully on record before.
As with all his work, the music is melodically original & the arrangement his trademark apparent simplicity augmented by tasteful additional touches by a range of instruments, leaving focus clearly on the singing & the tune.
The theme, though as I have said sombre, is not however necessarily dark: it is a song of intimate moments & solitude and once again I may be making a leap I'm not really entitled to do in terms of seeing within a personal lyric a much more universal comment on how people generally may be coping (or not) with disconnection from each other, but even if that's not quite what Ollie had in mind in writing "In The Darkness", it seems to work as such & I appreciate the empathy & sympathy accentuated by the lovely melody.
