Milo

How things change. 

Milo first came to us at Syffal like so many other artists, bundled from the cold, shivering, teeth chattering lyrics, feverishly rapping at our email's back door.  

And now, I basically begged him for a chance to review his latest release, So The Flies Don't Come. My turn in the blizzard. 

Milo, if you are somehow still unaware, is a rapper from Wisconsin, by way of Chicago and Los Angeles. I picture him growing up next door to Justin Vernon's wilderness breakup hideout before moving into a landlocked houseboat. He made his way to us via college airwaves and shitty dorm room speakers, places where his music still haunts, wafting down cinderblock hallways while children imagine Kant's underwear. 

Milo's prose seems unconcerned with what you think. So The Flies Don't Come is a stream of consciousness of observation and introspections that at times build to a flash flood, sweeping hypocrisies and expectations and generalizations and the opinions of people like me downstream. 

So The Flies Don't Come is Milo's latest offering of rap music. I tend to use the terms rap and hip hop interchangeably, but there can be the connotation that when music is labelled rap, we are insinuating its baser characteristics. While to bestow the label of hip hop somehow holds the raps to a higher standard of lyrical backpacker approval. I think Milo would tell you point blank this is a rap record. And mean it. 

His songs don't seem overly concerned with what you think anyway; more caught up in the wonder of the banal, the truthful, or the exercising of his point of view. Telling us how it is. Milo can fly. 

The wizard Kenny Segal handles much of the production on So The Flies Don't Come, and his off-kilter snares and effected organs and thick thumps make for just the cavern for Milo to paint horses on. 

I was tempted to say that Milo probably colored outside the lines when he was a child. But it struck me as soft revolutionary. Milo draws his own fucking lines, in a postmodern colored book. Milo drew his own seat at the table and is now passing mash potatoes to Myka 9 (the soulful "Zen Scientist") and Busdriver ("Song About a Raygun (An Ode to Driver)"). A young man amongst his heroes. 

Other features include Open Mike Eagle, Safari Al, Hemlock Ernst, and Elucid. I'm usually not one for them. I came here for a lanky, young black man with a full-throated diction and god's eyeballs. But thankfully none of his guest are eddies in the flow, each capable of their own torrents. 

Milo, for all of his layered meanings and intellectual references, can be goofy, he can be raw, he can be point fucking blank, "Oh yeah, I'm not a scofflaw either. Born from the racial tension between nigger rigs and MacGyvers. The difference between Quantum Leap and Sliders." How a millennial rapper even knows MacGyver, less long critique the racial implications of Jerry Rigging tampons hand-lotioned to toilet paper rolls for improvisational explosives, is the bomb. I mean... he… he has a song for Crosby. And I JUST got a haircut. So The Flies Don't Come.