Grocer sound a little like a modern version of Steinbeck by way of Pixies on its single “Downtown Side” from its newly released EP Scatter Plot. The playful melody has a discordant quality and unraveling edges that reflect a quiet desperation that boils under the surface of much of American society and everywhere else in the world where people are coming to the realization that grinding to get by is really no longer the delusion that it can lead to getting ahead which was a fiction twenty-five years ago and a completely fraudulent prop to late capitalism. What Grocer expresses so well to address this reality of modern life is the massive self neglect into which we’ve talked ourselves: “I could be bleeding from my head on the side of the curb/Am I dreaming that I’m even waiting for a desert?” That image and so many of the other poetic and clever metaphors that are in ever stanza of the song’s lyrics zero in on an inability to keep fooling oneself when reality the reality of life is punching you in the face every day whether you want to acknowledge it or not. The whistles and off the cuff percussion at one point in the song is almost like a mockery of engaging in that pantomime of healthy productivity. A slide whistle would have really been over the top but Grocer kept it to a lean and efficient gesture because “I guess it’s not that funny anymore/Maybe I lost that light, and it’s a heavy way forward.” Indeed. But this burst of self-awareness placed so well in a song that erases a boundary between pop, post-punk and psychedelia hits in exactly the right way without overstating the direness of a situation we could overcome if we had the collective will to do so or understating the challenge of reaching an easily attainable better world if society wasn’t so hypnotized by the illusion of mythologized and culturalized success. Listen to “Downtown Side” on YouTube and follow Grocer at the links below.
Queen City Sounds and Art 
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