Easy Going: Fear (Banana Records, 1979)

Synthetizers, orchestral layerings, jazzy harmonies. Vocoder. Moroder. This is the italo-disco sound of "Fear". Galloping, opulent, it never takes a break: its straightaway pace is constantly one step farther than you. Don't dismiss it as a carbon-copy of canonical disco music! It's wonderfully orchestrated and performed (a sine qua non for the genre), but it embodies a tipically European conception of the rhythm. A mechanical beat which projects funky into the realm of pure circularity. Something that would eventually gain ground in the U.S. and give rise to techno and house music...

Brazilian percussion ornaments don't really enrich the groove, they rather add some colour and make it even more hypnotic. And the vocals, often transfigured by electronic effects, doesn't have any of the soulful and liberating fibre of the usual disco classics. They're wry and sardonic, and perfectly merge with the lush style of the orchestrations and the smart elegance of the interplays: something Burt Bacharach would be proud of (or maybe not, but who cares).
Get caught in the breeze!

Easy Going was the most important disco-music project of Claudio Simonetti (of Goblin fame), Giancarlo Meo and Douglas Meakin. Songs were written and arranged by Simonetti, and performed mostly by himself (keyboards, guitar, bass) and a plethora of Italian collaborators disguised under fake English names. Simonetti still looks back at his disco-music years as the most funny and creative part of his decennal career.




Tracklist:

1. I Strip You
2. Fear
3. To Simonetti
4. Put Me in the Deal

Download (192 kbps)

Similar albums on the blog:
Giorgio Moroder: E=mc² (Durion, 1979)
Goblin: The Goblin Collection, 1975-1989 (DRG, 1995)