A hooded figure stands in a patch of woods that could be almost anywhere around here, from a state park to someplace just off the highway, with the camera pointed in the right direction. Then the scene cuts to another, and suddenly the location is as specific as it gets. The hooded figure now stands in front of the polar bear sculpture created by artist M.J. DeAngelo on the Tidal Marsh Trail.
It’s the newest video from SotoLish, released last week to support its latest album, 404, and the track’s sense of spooky urgency is as suited to the times as it gets.
Rapper Sotorios Fedeli (of Political Animals) and Delish released Medusa Glow in 2019, then fused to become SotoLish and kept making music. February 2020 saw them releasing a video for “Calderon,” featuring the musicians in an unfinished loft space and an elevator that seemed to open to anywhere. Their output after that suggests that they spent the pandemic writing 404. “Tetrahedron” appeared as a video in May. “Feral Fire” appeared in August. At last, the entire album appeared at the end of December, with a few videos for good measure in support.
“Kubrick Oven,” the album’s opener, starts the album off right with something like a sonar blip and a grinding guitar unspooling over a classic hip hop beat. Through it all, Fedeli takes a whirlwind tour of New Haven that starts at the Long Wharf taco trucks and proceeds downtown from there — as well as into Fedeli’s own troubles. “My whole city brick oven,” he raps, a nod at once to the apizza and to the pressure Fedeli feels. The track that follows, “Babel,” is a skittery, swooping banger. “Tetrahedron” employs the sound of Middle Eastern percussion to make a driving groove that expands into trap while Fedeli gives us a harrowing trip into his past.
“Pear Shaped Planet” strips the groove down to almost nothing but drums, which gives Fedeli a chance to take charge, unleashing the energy that makes him, as a live performer, the kind of MC who can make an entire room hop. “Twelve Twenty One” feels like it stepped out of a spy movie. “Montaur” uses a host of metallic and electronic sounds to make a groove that develops and expands over the course of the song while Fedeli raps across the bars. And then there’s the album’s closer, with its direct line to our current situation. “Why’s the shit that kills us got us feeling so alive?” Fedeli raps on the chorus. The line wraps up the pain and fear of the last year and uses it to point us toward the future, when we get to stagger out of the pandemic, bruised and battered but still here.
Somehow both gritty and lush, atmospheric and hard-hitting, 404 is a vital part of the opening statement for New Haven’s music scene as it heads into 2021, and hopefully a harbinger of more good things to come.
