Joshua Wood Orchestra Presents the Brilliant "Bad Way"
By Keir Nicoll
The B.C based punk-rock folk-hero, Joshua Wood, bares his soul on his new EP entitled ‘Badway’. With his vulnerable voice and vicious talent, Wood has this innate ability to articulate feelings you'd forgotten you had.
Wood has been a staple on the West Coast for 10 years, playing in Devil In The Woodshack and writing his own solo material. His stripped-down demo from 2018 was full of longing, pain and hope. Badway is its graceful evolution, gorgeous yet dusty with grit. Wood, a resident of the small and inspiring Gabriola Island, recorded this EP with Felix Fung at Little Red Sounds.
The five song offering is brimming with attitude, like a smoky backroom from a decades-old film. His music is a page torn straight out of the Rolling Stones’ book of rock and his lyrics reminiscent of Patti Smith. Wood delivers the goods right off the top with the title track. The rocking guitars are intricately layered and the hook, “Don't let me beg for it,” sets up the album’s story of a toxic love affair. Restraint and the inability to change one’s patterns permeate the themes throughout the album. The sense of earnest longing culminates on the lead single, Surrender, a song about learning to love oneself in spite of all the shit.
The EP’s final track- Wrong Side, is a gentle yet snarky reminder that change isn’t always bad. Wood’s conclusive lyrics: ‘I’m holding on to the wrong side of you’, gives the album a sense of closure. It’s hard not to see this journey as a sepia-filtered memory of the joy and the pain that has wracked each and every one of us over the course of our many trips around the sun. All you can hope is that when you look back, it’s with a smirk and not a scowl.
The finality of love isn’t the finality of you. Joshua Wood reminds us that we are never alone in our cocoon of isolation and emotional complexity. Bad Way is the best way to navigate our elusive pit of emotions through the sweet and salty prism of rock and roll.