Sunday, November 16, 2025

Groceries - s/t ep (1983, RD3)

I saw this one pop up on Ebay a few times while doing genre searches and was more than intrigued by the cover. Low and behold I found a copy in  the wild a few years ago and finally got around to digitizing it.  What little I had read about Groceries is that one point or another they bore something of a ska bent, but there's nary a trace of that here. In fact, "cheeky" would be the operative word in summing up the m.o. of this New Jersey five-piece.  Groceries were long on topical themes and performing acumen, yet didn't make a huge name for themselves despite a heavy gig presence in New York City.  Had they put more emphasis on  crafting tunes that were a little more melodically sentient, and curtailed the sardonic angle there might be a little more here for me, but for what it's worth I really admire the guitar textures coloring the concluding "Intelligentsia Junkie."  Other Groceries records are floating around (assumedly challenging to locate at this point) and 4/5 of the lineup has reconvened in the guise of the startlingly different sounding Groceries 2.0 which you can ascertain more about here.

01. Part of the New America
02. Hieroglyphic Shuffle
03. Government Rock
04. Tropical Island
05. Noon on Tuesday
06. Intelligentsia Junkie

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