New Music of The Day: LXXX – Wonderwall – Jourdan Myers

Anyone who knows me will probably be surprised that I am posting a cover, especially one as ubiquitous as Wonderwall. As someone who dedicates all their efforts to promoting new music, originality and uniqueness over the covers and standards scene, I normally make a firm stance against this sort of thing. But sometimes you have to admit when you are wrong. Occasionally an artist takes a song that you think can not be rebranded, improved on or manipulated any further and turns it into something so unexpectedly brilliant that even a po-faced, arch music snob such as myself is thawed into submission. Jourdan Myers has done just that…and more.

Trading in hushed, atmospheric beauty and understated  yet dynamically impressive vocals, it stands as a beacon to all those pop stars who over-sing and over-work classics in the effort to ride the current more is more zeitgeist as spectacularly as they can. But this is something else, this is how you take a song that, in the UK at least, is associated with lad culture, football terrace chants and pub sing-alongs and turn it into a thing of understatement majesty, something that is as much about the anticipation built in the space between the notes and words as it is about its more tangible structure. Noel Gallagher famously once said that any well written song can be stripped down to the very basics and it will still work, but I bet even he didn’t see this coming.