MidnightCafe 2025
Shadows & Light
Searching for existential truths, American guitarist finds resonant grandeur in the contrast between silken-soft lace and diamond-solid riffs.
Life’s not been easy for Mario Parga in the last two decades. His sophomore solo album, "Entranced" from 2007, was pregnant with instrumental promise, and the update of its “Spirit Of Night” single which appeared a year later with Tony Martin’s voice on only intensified the expectancy – yet even best-laid schemes tend to go awry. Due to family circumstances, the six-string adventurer had to abandon music business, but although Parga channeled his artistic leanings into equally evocative paintings for quite a time, he never stopped playing. After a long silence, results of Parga’s melodic ruminations finally form a singular tapestry whose many folds give a deeply heartfelt meaning to this record.
With Tim Luce on bass and Mark Mendez on drums, Parga created more than mere fretboard-based soundscapes: what he’s weaving here is a series of breathtaking panoramas of a romantic’s inner sanctum adorned with microcosmic details which can’t cease to stun. It’s not just majestic tunes like opener “Ra’s Dream” – where epic heaviness and web-light acoustic vignettes dance around each other, rather than vie for space – that reel the listener in and refuse to let go of one’s psyche; it’s also the fantastically organic delivery of these pieces that slowly unfold their harmonies under Mario’s nimble fingers. No whammy bars or floating bridges are involved in his sonic vistas, and if the elegiac, faux-live “Electric Lounge” involves four guest soloists passing around the composer’s funky filigree and uses Eric Ragno’s ivories to ground the shredders’ flight, such cuts as “Hollywood” seem to stay within hard-rock boundaries but break away from initial patterns and harness passion soon enough to keep the audience arrested.
So while the stereo-spanning “The Guitar Man” focuses on orchestral grandeur of powerful, blues-tinged fusion, and “Kelso Depot” explores lusty grooves, “Bayou Fantome” goes for flamenco-esque nostalgia before swinging wildly, and the delicate, yet soul-shattering, “Echo Bay (For Shawna)” and “Kyoto Belle” offer a wondrous dewdrop suspense with an almost symphonic sway. There’s sentimental vibrancy to the mighty twang of “Twilight Rain” and old-time vinyl swirl to “The Living End” which waltzes towards the album’s end, and it’s this emotional angle that fuels Parga’s prowess and renders Mario’s return genuinely transcendental.
*****
