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 Ben Green

Blank Realm – Go Easy (Fire)

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Blank Realm - Go Easy

By Ben Green

Go Easy has been acting kind of strange.

A bunch of songs got together a little while ago for a group photo, but they’ve since had so many adventures and grown so much facial hair they look like strangers. Meanwhile the photo’s taken on a life of its own, it keeps being reprinted, in silt on the breeze, in your sucky bedroom, then in pink vinyl on fire, now it’s having adventures on billboards around the world.

Go Easy has made a mess and it wants you to clean it up again.

A bunch of people got together a long while ago for a group photography course, but they were more interested in splashing around in the dark room than in taking the pictures out to look at them. The pictures were actually pretty great, but boy did they make a mess. Love has to be the most loaded word in life and the most meaningless word in music. This is the first time the word love has been in a Blank Realm song and they’re asking it to clean up their mess. Again! No one’s asked it that.

Go Easy is a radical jukebox. Alan Vega, wearing pink vinyl pants and an asteroid belt, swings his pelvis into our solar system looking through his aviators for the mad sounds he vibed on when the Voyager Golden Record hit his star  bearing such tunes as ‘The First Tools’, ‘Brandenburg Concertos’, an hour of the brainwaves of a woman meditating on violence and love, and ‘Johnny B. Goode’.  It shot straight to number one there because they didn’t realise it was a compilation, their species having no hang-ups about bands needing a narrow sonic identity. When Al passes Saturn he picks up a thought that Sun Ra left floating, directing him to Brisbane, Earth.

Go Easy is lying in your backyard, stoned in the sun. Everything’s growing.

Go Easy wakes you up in someone else’s backyard in Brisbane. Blank Realm is playing on a stage made of empty XXXX tallies. Parched, you reach behind your head for your own bottle and take a big swig of ash. Everyone laughs and a kid squirts you with the hose while Alan Vega blows smoke rings, before presenting you with an esky filled with the purest white ice and glistening beers.

Go Easy is a top-down ride down a wide avenue with tall palm trees on either side. Go Easy is smoking in the passenger seat. “They don’t ever play the songs I like,” it says, all matter-of-fact, as you turn the radio on. You drive past a billboard carrying a group photo that looks very familiar. “Hey, this station’s great!”

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