Grocer – Queen City Sounds and Art

Grocer’s “Packrat” is an Anthem For the Neurotic, Controlling, Dissociative Behaviors We Adopt to Cope With the Downward Spiral of Modern Life

On its new single “Packrat,” Philadelphia’s Grocer sounds like it has perhaps been revisiting some neglected 90s rock with it’s gigantic, melodic hooks and buoyant vocals. But like a lot of the music of that era, it’s simply emotionally raw and honest except Grocer has delivered one of the most accurate portraits of anxiety and psychological paralysis of recent times. Its snippets about the dissociative behaviors one often exhibits when your brain gets stuck on some detail rather than moving on as some odd act of delusional micro control over something rather than let it all potentially unravel along with your sense of self. The title of the song points out to one of those controlling tendencies that also give the illusion of control and maintaining. Many of us have been in those moments here and there in the past couple of decades as more and more is demanded in everyday life with increasingly little given in return for our moments, energy and dedication. The line “I’ll survive off anything/Before I live in the moment” is a painfully amusing summary of life in late capitalism and being in survival mode so often that you have to ignore that thriving isn’t often on the table nearly enough for much of anyone that isn’t already rich and even for those people that pressure on everyone else trickles up in ways the world only started to try to address with the early pandemic. But the song itself sounds like a cathartic and playful send up of those gnarled and desperate feelings channeled off into bursts of cognitive dissonance and dysfunction readily recognizable by anyone honest about the state of things. Listen to “Packrat” on Spotify and follow Grocer at the links below. Expect the group’s new album Bless Me out April 19, 2024 on digital, vinyl and CD.

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Grocer’s “Downtown Side” is an Incisive Deconstuction of the Everyday Impact of Late Stage Capitalism

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.

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Grocer Celebrates a Break From the Everyday Grind on “Calling Out”

Nicholas Rahn’s treatment in the video for Grocer’s song “Calling Out” presents the appropriately surrealistic mood of the song. People dressed in animal suits as a pig, a bird, a horse and perhaps a caterpillar work regular jobs as part of the usual rat race and in desperate need of some time out of that maddening and mind-dullening world as exemplified by the discordantly playful, herky jerky dynamic of the song with guitar both in staccato melody and in frantic pace with the rhythm. The vocals sound like inner dialogue diary entries sketching out the unspoken thoughts and all but shouting them like a triumph over the overwhelming mundanity of too much of everyday existence. The video ends with the members of the band sitting at a diner table being served by the caterpillar in one of the more meta music video moments in recent times and ending like we’ve just seen an outtake of an episode from Kids in the Hall, Mr. Show or Wonder Showzen with a different cast. Fans of Dehd and Lithics will probably find something endearing about the song and what Grocer is doing in general. Watch the video for “Calling Out” on YouTube, follow Grocer at the links provided and check out the rest of the group’s new album Numbers Game which released on May 6.

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Grocer’s “Pick A Way” is the Musical Embodiment of the Psychological Paralysis of Life Under Late Capitalism

It seems entirely appropriate that Grocer is in the dark dimly lit by occasional flashlight illumination focusing on parts of members of the band for the video for “Pick A Way.” In writing the song the band found a way to make start and stop dynamics work without sounding like they’re stumbling over each other while conveying a deep sense of existential stasis with a burst of guitar noise splaying out and churning back in among the other sounds while the rhythm section maintains the meditative beat. It’s like listening to a much more introspective early Preoccupations song with the willingness to take straight forward sounds and rhythms and deconstruct them mid-song while maintaining forward motion without collapsing. Which is a bit like an analog to the state of mind described in the song where maybe you’re living a life where there were expectations based on what you’ve been told implicitly by culture and maybe even aligning with the trajectory of your life until it isn’t and you’re left wondering where to focus your energies, what direction to go when there’s really nothing there for you and you have to try to figure something out in an economic, social and political world that is in disarray and turmoil and basically collapsed but not yet recognizing it and with no leaders or movements to suggest a path out of the slow moving quagmire to doomsday. It’s an unusual song yet what better music to help clarify where you might be at by expressing similar feelings with such clarity of mood? Maybe, as with many psychological states of stasis and emotional paralysis, it is best to pick some route of action in life and go with that rather than flail while the world burns. Watch the video for “Pick A Way” on YouTube, connect with Grocer at the links below and look out for the band’s forthcoming LP Numbers Game due out 5/6/22.