It has taken me a while to understand this band. At first they sound like a manufactured solo artist, but they are the Davincis BAND. They are a singer/songwriter lead trio whose inspired story of overcoming ethnic and artistic adversity to create a band that redefines what pop music could be, whilst exploring their spiritual path over an open book that would challenge their audience to look at themselves and the world in an entirely new light.

Personally they lost me at the line “we can fly as far as our eyes can see / without even looking down” 43 seconds into the first track. Especially after reading that singer/songwriter Ian Saint John is described as “lyrically ambitious” in their myspace bio. They also describe their influences spanning "soul, folk, blues, jazz, heavy-rock, classical…" but I can only hear pop.

The E.P. sounds great, if over-produced. There are some nice chords, the vocals are good; everything is there. The only thing is that there is a ‘but…’ only I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. After listening, leaving it, and listening again. Then researching and re-listening, all I can come up with is that it is simply not very good. They have checked the boxes with the minimum of a stroke. The thing is, there is some kind of substance to this record that invited me to listen to it again, but I don’t think it was the music, I think it was the effort that comes across. These guys are trying to make pop music with integrity. What they have come up with is pop music, and they have integrity. They haven’t managed to integrate the two yet. With the possible exception of track 2 - “I don’t even know” this E.P. is a collection of ‘samey’ pop ballads and even on track 2 the vocals stop their sound branching out very far.


They’re a little caught-up in being spiritual and they have decided that spiritual music is up-lifting, with a positive attitude and a message that says ‘you can do this!’ They need to look back at their influences. Blues was a precursor to most of those styles and it is not supposed to be uplifting, it comes from struggle and defiance. They could take a lesson from Jazz and learn when not to play, and from folk music they could learn to not write about what could be and rather what has been. They came close with ‘Spiritual Friend’ but the song doesn’t breathe for nearly 3 minutes, and gets very repetitive before the end. And with that I am going to end before I start repeating myself.