REVIEW, September 2021
 
"I’m night driving. Over my shoulder, there’s a yellow moon on the rise. It’s a meandering country mile. For company, I slip a disc into the dashboard player . . . and there’s that fugitive midnight voice, the tone shifting, now cajoling, now plangent, then demanding, then placating . . .
He sings powerfully of aching hearts, madness, strange feelings, the ill-fated, the lonely ones, false alibis . . . yet there’s the sense of outlaw romance and resilience, of ‘no surrender’, in the dynamics of the songs. He might be a friend of the devil but you’d sure like him on your side in a tight corner, when your back’s against the wall.
There’s a rocking beat, twangy guitars with rousing riffs, a punchy bass and a rasping harmonica. This is edge-of-the seat, bubble-in-the-chest music. And it comes straight out of the golden years of rock and pop.
I realise that, maybe coincidentally, but perhaps significantly nonetheless, all four songs I’m hearing have a night-time theme, and three have a star, or stars, as a multi-layered trope, alternatively figuring bad luck, hope in adversity and cosmic duplicity, drawing me deep into the possibilities of parallel worlds.
Well now . . . best keep my eyes on the road and my hands upon the wheel!
Spirited singer-songwriter Gordon Wood always has an urgent and intense tale to tell, and the proof is here again in this mettlesome EP named for the opening alt-country track, Just Another Star-Crossed Troubadour. We’re also given the instantly involving Sweet Angel Eyes, the small-hours discomfiture of Out of My Mind and the dreamy allure of The Girl with the Stars in Her Eyes.
Wood, playing acoustic guitar, bass guitar and harmonica, has assembled a cracking combo with Guy Mansfield-Smith on electric and classical guitars, Paul Arthurs on drums and Phil Hambling providing backing vocals on Out of My Mind."