Brian Slattery Photo
It was toward the end of Sketch Tha Cataclysm‘s set, and he’d just finished an a cappella verse as DJ Mo Niklz fired up the next number, adding rhythms from his turntables. “The crowd has got me feeling open,” Sketch rapped. “And / the vibe has got me right and focused / And / The front and back in fact the whole way around / Know that when we come to rock, y’all can’t mess with the sound.”
It was part of a Thursday night of honest and empowering hip hop at Best Video, as two New Haven-based acts — one a seasoned veteran, one up-and-coming — showed the audience what they could do.
Mo Niklz started off the evening with a short DJ set as the anime Cowboy Bebop played in the background. Spark Kent (real name, Tyler Allen Hoss) then took the stage, announcing that he was set to release a new album, Northern Hospitality, in just a couple weeks. He then mentioned that his first song came about after a plunge down the “rabbit hole” of YouTube conspiracy theories. As the impeachment hearings played on radio waves everywhere, Kent’s first song laid down an interesting parallel, reminding the listener of the mindset that had gotten the president in trouble in the first place.
But Kent soon got more personal. He told the audience that he had been living on his own since he was 16. Three years ago, his mother died from a fentanyl overdose, after years of battling alcoholism. “I wrote this song right before she passed,” Kent said. “It was kind of like a letter. I wanted to get through to her. Because when you got people who are addicted to whatever substance it may be … it’s hard to get through to some people.”
The song was heartfelt and disarming, and Kent meant every word. “I miss my mom,” Kent said as the song ended. “It’s crazy.”
But he showed a more humorous side. One song was about resorting to certain decriminalized depressants to deal with the pressures of life. Another drew inspiration from working at a dead-end retail job for five years under a boss with whom he did not get along (“his character was hardly even amateur,” Kent rapped, “stringing me along with a promise to be manager”).
“That was before I got into fire suppression,” Kent said.
“Mister Foam Slinger!” said his hype man, Rob Brockett, on a second microphone.
He gave the air a karate kick as the song ended. “That’s how I feel after performing that.”
The crowd was small, but it showed a lot of appreciation, and Kent threw that appreciation back. “I’m just a very little white dude who took 10 years to get this good,” he said, thanking the audience again.
Sketch Tha Cataclysm (real name, Armando Acevedo), meanwhile, showed that his game as a rapper was as strong as ever. He mostly dispensed with between-song banter; the songs spoke for themselves. With a flow that married intricate rhyme schemes with rhythmic density, in a few songs he drew a portrait of himself as an ambitious yet vulnerable man who also preached a powerful narrative of personal and social uplift.
“I wanna feel the push, I wanna feel the rain, I wanna feel the real me pulsing through my veins,” he rapped, but then addressed the chorus to anyone who might have something bottled up inside. “Let it out for me,” he rapped.
“If you’re with me, say hey,” Sketch said to the audience a few times over the course of his set. The audience responded; they had his back.
“Cool,” Sketch said.
As his songs continued, he wove the threads of personal vulnerability and social uplift together to create a narrative that drew strength from its honesty, as the music sampled from a long history of grooves from the United States and the Caribbean.
“Never say I’ll throw my mic away,” he rapped. “‘Cause I can’t think of a better way to throw my life away.” It was a note of defiance and hope that carried well over the set was over.
