7D Media / Third Star 2025
A secret place where time stands still might be a perfect starting point for a trip into the future.
“The harder we try the less we achieve”: the first half of refrain from the last number on Marco Mattei’s second album might be a leitmotif for many a progressive rock artist, but not for this Civitavecchia-born Texan whose 2021 debut "Out Of Control" promised further surprises – and here they are. However, while that record’s cover artwork showed a boat hovering above prairie grass which ran towards the horizon, there’s a country boy wading in the waters which lap against urban landscape now, and such a change is an overt indicator of a great divide between the two offerings. With a childlike wonder at the fore and mature gravitas in the background, the pieces on “Age Of Fragility” strive for philosophical dive into current affairs of a single person’s inner world.
This is why the fatigued, ruminative opener “Just Tired” feels so understandable and easy to relate to. Its cinematic vistas seem infinite when accessed via the piano-propelled epic’s extended variant that’s appended to the album as a bonus to provide a deeper insight into Mattei’s non-intrusive advances and intimate advices, as channeled through one of guest vocalists, and the delicate interplay of his exquisite guitars with mesmeric groove sculpted by Jerry Marotta and Tony Levin in a Woodstock studio. And this is why the drone-driven “You Don’t Deserve It” proposes a pop angle to self-doubt and the jazz-tinged “Human Again” requires a female voice to reveal sweet vulnerability. Still, a torch song “Wrong” searches for solemn tenderness in scintillating strum and rolls of slider, which will dissolve in the spoken-word-encrusted and Mellotron-augmented instrumental “Insomnia” to turn from ethereal to tangible once Trey Gunn’s riffs arrive to complement Marco’s licks and loops.
But if “A Trick Of The Mind” rises rather spiritually from crepuscular folk to sunlit fusion, and the strings-drenched “Watermark In My Heart” exposes its bluesy core, the equally chamber “So Fragile” embraces hymnal sentiments, and the wondrous “End Of The Line” brings the record to a close with a warm breathe and the eternal question “Why don’t we allow ourselves just to live” that will stay in the listener’s heart for a long time. “Age Of Fragility” is an album of endless appeal.
*****
