It seems like everyday there's another new band, singer, or musician releasing a disc of music that's pretty much indiscernible from the rest of what you hear. No matter what genre or category their music falls into, most everybody you listen to seem to be adhering to the principal that originality is bad and sounding like everybody else as much as possible is good.

When classical musicians play a piece that everybody has heard, "Moonlight Sonata" by Beethoven for example, and countless others have played, they, at least, attempt to make their performance unique from others through the strength of their personality and their own individual style of performance. In pop music it seems the opposite prevails as more and more everybody tries to sound like last year's hit.

Coming across a performer who attempts to place their own stamp on the music they're playing is like stumbling across an oasis in the desert. Listening to a musician who not only imprints his or her music with personal touches, but has also dared to fiddle with excepted formulae to creates something original has become such an oddity that when we do come across them, they are definitely worth celebrating.

That was the case when I first heard Francis Jocky a couple of years ago when he released Mr. Pain his first CD. At the time, I remember being blown away by his passion and the emotional honesty of his music, both of which have become conspicuous by their absence in popular music these days. So when I was offered a copy of his new EP, Sanctified, being released in the next couple of weeks by KoKo Records, I was genuinely interested in seeing what he was doing now. It's been two years since his last release and he's now based in New York instead of Paris France, and I wondered what effect the intervening years and the change in geography would have had on his music.

The answer to that is none at all, as he hasn't lost any of the qualities that I admired in the first place, and tons, because there is much more to his music now then there was before. Where on Mr. Pain Jocky seemed content to confine himself to R&B, and pop influenced soul music, on Sanctified he has spread his wings (Sorry, not a deliberate pun on the cover art). There are only six songs on this EP, and while two of them, "Ghost" and "Everything" were along the lines of the material found on his first release, it felt like he was trying something new with his music.

You could hear it in the aggressive, almost hard edge of the opening track "You Feel The Heat", the hint of a reggae back beat in "Meant To Last", and the way the sound of the last two tracks, "Your Way" and "Sanctified" appears to fill the room without being loud or over produced. On the first release, in comparison to this, it now feels like he was restraining himself, almost like he was letting himself be confined by the needs of the genre he was performing. Somewhere, somehow, in the last two years, he seems to have found the key to balancing the need for sounding professional and polished with the needs of his heart to express itself as fully and completely as possible.