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Good Jumper are a joy. Deliberately hopeless and wantonly waifish, they strike a bold pose amidst the norms of male performance in Russia today. If we want a brief snapshot of where they find the inspiration to be so contrary, then we already have a selection of names offered by the band themselves: The Velvet Underground, T-Rex, Iggy Pop, Happy Mondays, The Stone Roses, Pulp, The Strokes, The Libertines, Tricky, and The Charlatans.
It's the earliest and oldest of those influences that has struck the most obvious chord with the Russian music press, who've pigeonholed Good Jumper as a "catchy mix of 60s' melodies in the tradition of The Byrds together with American college-rock, something like Pavement or Sebadoh."
Good Jumper play a new, fashionable, and slightly provocative retro-rock.
The need to define something new by casting a glance towards the past results in somewhat contrary quotes from reviewers: "Good Jumper play a new, fashionable, and slightly provocative retro-rock."
Other publications have noted a "nervously lo-fi style that's full of strange guitar riffs, plus lots of other sounds that keep slipping away." Maybe the best celebration of this shabby aesthetic has been the declaration that "to live in Moscow and not see Good Jumper play would be dopey, at the very least!" The band's decision to invoke people like the Velvet Underground makes sense sonically: their slow, lazy, even drug-addled strumming is often pushed to the fore, such that mumbled vocals become almost indistinguishable.
It's this same notion of diminished, distanced presence that makes Bolan an even more useful parallel.
Good Jumper play up these associations, either knowingly or simply as a result of having cuddled their favorite CD covers for too long: hence the big, back-combed hair, the bared, bony midriffs of a diminutive physique, and the ubiquitous Afghan coats.
Bolan, himself of no great height, had tried in his early career to match the strident, pragmatic politics of Dylan, but instead descended or retreated into a validated "smallness" of other styles. Big ideas on even bigger issues instead became the fantasy dimensions of folklore. Everybody stopped riding to DC for protests and started riding white swans instead.
These dreamy tendencies would soon inform the ironic use of sci-fi works in glam rock, and there is much in Good Jumper to suggest that they might become precursors of a Russian glam movement - which'll be more than interesting if the current market woes make the funding of glam's excess impossible.
Time for trousers made from cooking foil.
The sexual ambiguity that Bolan cultivated - and glam played up even further - is evident in GJ's work, especially in the recently released mini-album that's free for download via a French netlabel. Kept far away in the tinny, trebly mess of its "production" levels, all vocals are delivered either in a wavering, pixie-like fashion or used to embody various miniature themes.
No, please don't! Anything but that!
The clearest example would be the track "No!" (Net!) in which a goblinesque voice says over and again: "No, please don't! Anything but that!" - after which the actuality of some mystical threat is reduced to comic book slaps and squeaking noises. Nothing on a big, adult scale is taken seriously.
Good Jumper's hedonistic embrace of smallness, sexual vagaries, and a scruffy soundscape are an endlessly interesting engagement with deliberate amateurism. What's even more interesting is what'll come next.
Maybe the birth of a new bohemia on the model of the Velvets, thus moving away from the very British sound of post-industrial shoegazing that has been so influential in Moscow and St Petersburg.
Maybe, as suggested, a new Russian glam? The popularity of neighboring Finnish goth bands would suggest that the groundwork has been laid already...
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