Sotorios Fedeli, the garrulous MC in Political Animals, was at a loss for words. The band was just taking the stage on Saturday night at Pacific Standard Tavern after three warm-up acts had preceded it, and he looked over the sea of faces in front of him.
“Thank you so much,” he said. “We sold this place out. I can’t even —”
He trailed off. It was the last time he wouldn’t finish a sentence for the rest of the night.
The New Haven-based hip hop group Political Animals had come to Pacific Standard Tavern to celebrate the release of Egobese, its first full-length album since 2011’s When Animals Attack.
The band worried for a bit that the show might not happen, Fedeli suggested during the set. The band members certainly didn’t act like they expected so many people to come, despite being a hardworking band locally and elsewhere — from Stella Blues right next door on Crown Street to as far away as Maine and Ohio.
The crowd began to grow as DJ Mo Nicklz manned the decks for a solo set to start off the evening. It was already a good size when local MC Mister took the mic. Backed up by Nicklz on the tuntables and fronted by b‑boys and b‑girls who cleared a space on the packed floor to breakdance, Mister delivered a high-energy set that had the audience singing along with him by the end. Proclaiming the crowd to be the best he’d performed in front of in a while, he turned around and extended a long arm to take a selfie with the audience behind him.
“You’ll never see it,” Mister joked, “because I’m going to put it in a scrapbook.”
As the audience continued to grow, the Worcester, MA-based quartet Kroma Kode jammed on a set of instrumentals that brought the energy down a notch from Mister’s frenetic performance, but also deepened it, as they connected with the people on the floor and got them moving, smiling, and bobbing their heads.
“We’ll definitely be back,” said guitarist Lee Canales.
But the night belonged to Political Animals. From the very first song, the band was locked in and ripping it up as if they’d already been playing for hours and were deep into it. Drummer Trent Wright nailed every groove to the floor with unerring precision while guitarist Rob Aceto smoked riff after riff and Nicklz — sitting in with the band in place of DJ NEB — laid down samples with skill. Jenny Harper built the backbone of the beat with muscular bass playing and subterranean keyboards. All together, the band was a model of stripped down economy; they showed how to create a monstrous rhythm by picking all the right accents and no more, letting the space make the rest.
With that kind of sound behind him, Fedeli could turn his charisma fully on the crowd. He captured them within seconds and didn’t let up until the end — all the way through a pitched b‑boy battle, several guest MCs, and a piece featuring Casey Dixon beatboxing on a didgeridoo (“He just cured you!” Fedeli shouted at the end. “Of your dis-ease!”). Spitting out rhyme after rhyme, Fedeli ruled the front of the stage, bounding across it, one hand pressing the mic to his mouth while the other was almost always stretched toward the audience, whether grasping outstretched hands from the first row, pointing toward the ceiling, or just holding it out in front of him, as if taking everyone in. It was a gesture filled with generosity, and gratitude.
Just like Fedeli said at the end of the set, when most of the lights had been turned out and the screams from the crowd seemed to shake the walls, and he was overcome with the turnout as old friends and new fans packed the place from the stage to the bar well into the night.
“We won’t stop thanking you,” he said.
Video below courtesy of NHVMusic.
A video posted by New Haven Local Scene (@nhvmusic) on Oct 2, 2016 at 3:47am PDT