Margate’s Art’s Cool have been doing a lot of interesting stuff in their seaside town for a few years now, namely hosting forward-thinking shows. The new music connoisseurs have now expanded their realms with the launch of their new label and the inaugural release ‘Fidget’ from south-London via Tunbridge Wells quartet, JC Palmer.
A heady-dose of sprawling art-rock, there’s something gloriously agitated about ‘Fidget’. A frenetic beast bathed in barbed guitars – it’s a restless juggernaut for these times when the four walls around us feel like they’re ever closing in.
On the track Jake Palmer of JC Palmer states: “‘Fidget’ is about misunderstanding what it means to be emotionally intimate, like some impatient gardener expecting closeness and an important connection to spring out of infertile ground. It’s about finally realising that you’ve been trying to fit a square peg in a round hole, and letting go of the situation that you were trying desperately to make work.”
Akin to the earlier material of contemporaries Traams, here JC Palmer intertwines the stylings of caustic post-punk, garage-rock and krautrock with a pop-twang – as with the pint-spiller, juggernaut that is the chorus. ‘Fidget’ is for the post-Covid age. It’s the mosh-pit ready anthem for when we get the green light, where bodies are ricocheting around the sun-baked or rain-soaked festival fields surrounded by mates and strangers a like.
The new issue of So Young is out now. Its sold out in print but you can read the digital edition below.