Niccolò Fabi
Una somma di piccole cose

LA RECENSIONE

After "Il padrone della festa" with the musical project Fabi-Silvestri-Gazzè, and related tour, the three have returned to releasing albums individually (notably mirroring the trio's name: Gazzè-Silvestri-Fabi). In April, "Una somma di piccole cose" by Niccolò Fabi was released, consisting of nine new tracks (including a cover "Le cose non si mettono bene" by the group Hellosocrate - I have to thank Wikipedia for this clarification) composed and recorded during a period of isolation lasting about two months in a house in the countryside near Rome. Played entirely by him, the music is stripped down to the essentials, creating an intimate, reflective atmosphere: guitar predominates, along with piano and hints of percussion (so forget about the Fabi of "Se fossi Marco" or "Dica").

Titles like "Non vale più", "Vince chi molla"... are not very encouraging, but topics such as social discomfort and metropolises losing humanity are treated with simplicity, calmness, and irony where possible - as in the single "Ha perso la città" (for instance: "hanno vinto i ristoranti giapponesi che poi sono cinesi anche se il cibo è giapponese"). Hope and nostalgia in "Filosofia agricola", the dreamy “Facciamo finta” (“Facciamo finta che io non mi spavento quando arriva la fine, prima o poi capita. Facciamo finta che chi fa successo…se lo merita”). The awareness that “ogni minuto che abbiamo sprecato e non ritornerà” here Fabi hypothesizes two solutions “o un bell’asteroide e si riparte da zero, o una somma di piccole cose”.

For such an album, words become superfluous, insisting to the point of exhaustion that in this album the artist's maturation is even more noticeable, an album deliberately not purely radio-friendly, an album that is like a medicine or a "balm"... it can all be summed up in the name of the album, as well as its first track, “Una somma di piccole cose”.