“Jopps,” the third cut off Medusa Glow from Sotorious and Delish Music, starts with a distorted, janky guitar that isn’t so much playing a riff as letting one spill from the instrument. It’s an effective hook for something so rhythmically obtuse. But sure enough a beat is imposed, crisp and clean, and Sotorious isn’t far behind.
“I’m taking shelter in the shadows / with everybody else that bit the apple,” Fedeli raps. “Listen close, listen close / look at here, look at here.” By then, “Jopps” has blossomed into a track featuring slithering synths, a singer sampled from somewhere, a reggae-tinged organ. Sotorious becomes our guide through this shifting musical landscape, creating and releasing tension over and over. It sounds new, but also steeped in hip hop’s history — which is just as it should be.
Medusa Glow is a collaboration between Sotorios Fedeli, frontman for Political Animals — a band that tore up New Haven’s stages for a few years with its brand of hip hop that featured a full band plus a DJ, plus Fedeli on the mic — and Delish Music, a Providence, R.I.-based collective that has a lot in common with Political Animals, in its mixing of live and sampled sounds and commitment to gritty, hard-driving beats.
Brian Slattery Photo
Sotorios in 2016 at Pacific Standard Tavern.
With mainstream hip hop still under the spell of trap and the kinds of synthesizer sounds that felt more common in the 1980s, and with the members of live-band-hip-hop pioneers The Roots now enjoying their role as hip hop elder statesmen while they serve as the house band for Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, the music Sotorios and Delish Music are making can feel like a throwback to when sampling culture was in its heyday and hip hop thrived on creating cohesive wholes from incongruous elements. But that’s only if you believe that hip hop hasn’t simply changed over time, but proliferated. The experiments started in the 1980s and 1990s continue to this day, and part of hip hop’s lasting vitality is in its sonic diversity, as Sad Fat Luck and Sans Soleil, which New Haven’s own Ceschi put out this year, demonstrate. Sotorios and Delish Music’s release is part of that continuum.
So “Death by: Death” begins with a chant that sounds almost a prayer dropping into a beat with a gritty organ, in which Sotorious is in maximum wordplay mode, rhyming “felonious” with “onerous” and “tumultuous.” Speaking“There You Are” keeps it mellow with echoing guitar and a loping beat that finds Sotorious in a love-hate relationship. The half-drunk jazz piano and swinging drums in “Dalivision” make that song the collective’s loosest number on the album. And “Calderon” exists in a nervous, druggy haze that brings the album to an energetic close.
For those missing Political Animals’ frenetic live shows, or who are wondering what Sotorios has been up to lately, Medusa Glow is a way to catch up — and see how the music is moving forward. Medusa Glow is another fitting chapter in the story of New Haven hip hop.
Find Medusa Glow on Bandcamp.
