Penn: Morning Album Reviews — Jump, Little Children (Finale Part three, day six) (Patreon)

1/22 Jump, Little Children’s 1998 Magazine

Jump, Little Children is a band from Winston Salem, North Carolina, just an hour and a half away from where Anna Rose and I went to college. I’ve mentioned her before—it’s inevitable when someone’s been in your life for as long and as closely as she has been in mine, although I’ve not written about her a ton. I’ve not actually talked to her about this, but my suspicion is that she’d rather not be all that public. Suffice it to say that she is family in a kind of immutable way, and beyond that the details aren’t that important. 

We met the second week of my freshman year of college. I’d followed the woman I’d assumed would be the love of my life to the Pagan Student Association, having met her on move in day. She had her door open, and I saw her setting up an altar space. I conjured up every scrap of wisdom 18 years of life had afforded me, and sputtered incoherently that I was pagan and also, incidentally, a lesbian. She was only one of these things, (which, I suppose, so was I) and we became friends. She even introduced me to the other pagan lesbian she knew, because this is North Carolina, and there was one of them. We did not particularly become friends. 

Anyway, like I said, I followed my new friend like a baby bird to the first PSA meeting of the year, and that is when I met Anna Rose. I’m eliding a lot of the story, obviously, but that “this is the most interesting person in the room” thing that is a primary note in my meet cute with El is also true here, and we become very close, very quickly. And soon enough, she brings me to my first concert that was not a part of a revival or otherwise churchly. 

It was a Jump, Little Children show at Legends, a small venue that was more or less on campus. Anna Rose had seen them there with some friends when they came through the previous year, and had left as a Jump fan. I remember the evening before our show, sitting on the twin mattress that we shared in her dorm while she played me some of their music. I was, I’ll admit, not immediately convinced. I don’t remember exactly what she put on that evening, but it was the era of “the music you happen to have downloaded,” so was likely mostly from The Licorice Tea Demos. That goes wrong for me in predictable ways: I’d not yet developed a tolerance for indie recording, and the demos lean a touch folk and sluggish.

Alright then, she had one last argument to make for the band, “Cathedrals,” from their 1998 record Magazine. It’s undeniably their most well known song, having been covered by Dar Williams both solo, and with Cry Cry Cry, and then on her 2021 solo tour, where she’s got Ward Williams, the guitarist and cello player for Jump, in her backing band. Obviously, they also play the song.

Also, it’s just a very good song. It’s the kind of composition that’s built to showcase the band’s strengths, making solid use of the fact that they have a cello and a double bass, and of the fact that their vocalist just runs at a constant melancholy. It is achingly beautiful—a song about an overwhelming feeling of awe in a holy place, and of homesickness for somewhere you’ve not yet found—somewhere you may never find. I was, predictably, moved by that sentiment. Hell, I’ve finally found my home and I’m still moved by it. It conjures such a specific emotion, and so well.

The song made me cry, which I found inexplicable at the time. (Yeah, the year between 18 and 19 did not bring all that much wisdom.) Regardless, I found it to be a compelling argument, and so we went to see Jump, Little Children. The show was great, and every step of the experience was new to me. Standing in line at the box office in front of the little brick building, just a little too cold in the September mountain air. Standing around in the venue waiting, just a little too warm as the bodies crowd in. It’s magic. 

We got a place close to the stage, near where the cello was set up. The opener that night was Carbon Leaf, a celtic folk band from Virgina; we’d go see them again at Legends while I was a student (a god awful band called Ruby Horse opened for them; we bought their CD) but I don’t really remember either performance that well. I was never quite as into celtic folk as the rest of the Pagan Student Association set, you know?

But while Carbon Leaf felt like something I might have been allowed to run into as a kid, Jump Little Children was rock, and moreover, it was gorgeous. I was fascinated by the double bass, and the bassist, Jonathan Gray. He was charismatic, in that “quiet guy in the back who just gets the job done” way that I do so love, and I couldn’t take my eyes off of him. That is, until the Encore, when Matthew Bivins, who is not the usual vocalist, took the microphone to do “Body Parts,” which is something a touch closer to a spoken word piece, and was uncomfortably sexy to my post-evangelical heart. 

The record itself is one of those things I know too well to say if it’s good; I love it regardless. Its style is a moving target, bouncing around between haunting and hard, with a pit stop over in ridiculous for “My Guitar,” which opens with some metal style guitar antics before diving into lyrics like:

“I’d like to see you out one night
Dressed up like a race car driver
You’d push the engine all the way
Then I know I’d love you
But if I see you out somewhere
You might think that I don’t care

‘Cause I love my guitar”

(Cue rocking out, of course.)

Like I said, it is patently ridiculous, and it feels a bit out of place right in the middle of the record right after that way too sexy song, and before one of it’s highlights, “B-13”—another song about an off kilter nostalgia, featuring the album’s title drop: 

“There is a place for me
Far, far away
In someone else’s dream
Or in a magazine”

In our show they use “My Guitar” (which I cannot type without hearing the bit of stage dialogue on Neil Young and Crazy Horse’s Live Rust) to close the main set, and the boys clearly just have a blast playing it together; it’s a really great high-energy note to leave people clapping for an encore. I suspect that’s roughly what it’s doing on the album, too, although it suffers a bit for the loss of live energy. “My Guitar” breaks up Bivins two vocal spots (the other, “Habit,” also being incredibly sexy, this time about vices that you refuse to quit: “I could make a habit out of you” cue a wistful sigh, this time) and the songs that follow are titled “Say Goodnight,” and “Close Your Eyes,” and to an extent do what they say on the tin.

Which is, I guess, to say that this is a 7 song studio album with a 3 song encore. Structurally, you could do worse.

Perfect for: were they the perfect choice for my first live show, or did I just imprint on them like a baby bird?