Once upon a time, Hoboken, NJ was generally considered to be among the least cool places on the Earth, a dumping ground for people without the skills or ambition to make it in New York City, but in the early '80s that perception began to change, and one of the bands that helped reshape Hoboken's image was the Individuals. The group's debut recording, the 1981 EP Aquamarine, was every bit as smart as anything that came out of the Big Apple at the time, but the five songs possessed a playfulness and fresh-faced energy that was becoming increasingly uncommon on the jaded New York scene, and at a time and place when grooves really mattered, drummer Doug Wygal and bassist Janet Wygal generated a rocksteady pulse you could dance to that embraced the new possibilities of funk as well as the force and abandon of rock & roll. While Jon Klages and Glenn Morrow would grow into a wildly impressive guitar combination by the time the Individuals cut their first (and only) full-length album, Fields, in 1982, their work on Aquamarine sounds just a bit tentative, and the engineering and production is too clean and not robust enough to capture this worthy band at full strength. But to say Aquamarine was a promising debut is to underestimate it -- short and sweet, this disc left no doubt that the Individuals had plenty to offer, and their next trip into the studio would shore up the few weak spots on this EP.