You can’t keep a good man down and Chris Rodger – on hiatus from Hercules Mandarin – is most certainly a good man and industrious to boot. With his latest project Halfway to Glasgow, he once more exercises his song writing skills.
Starting at the start as it were, “February Will Come” seems almost diametrically opposed to fluffy simplicity going instead for the intelligent conveyance of emotion as the song edges mainstream rock into folk. Whilst “The Dancers” meanders pleasantly and rather aimlessly, it does serve the purpose of setting the listener up for a big hitter like “Climb into My Pocket”. Now here is a song that just cries out for some money to be invested in it to make it into a juggernaut. The raw ingredients are there and it just needs scaled up to make it the kind of song that Rod Stewart would have covered back in his heyday. Rounding things off is the rather more reflective “Halfway to Glasgow”
This EP is the work of a steadily maturing songwriter without a doubt. There are songs on the EP just crying out for some money to be spent on them and therefore transform “Climb into My Pocket” and “February Will Come” into the standards that they would surely become.