Some of the best and weirdest alt rap in the country is coming out of Hellfyre Club, a Los Angeles-based collective founded in 2011 by California battle rapper turned rapper’s rapper Nocando. The roster boasts a host of eclectic wordsmiths like Project Blowed associate Open Mike Eagle, L.A. veteran Busdriver, and NxWorries member Anderson .Paak, who recently started to garner public attention after being prominently featured on Dr. Dre’s Compton. In 2013, the collective’s 17 track compilation, Dorner vs. Tookie, spotlit yet another featured lyricist: milo, aka Scallops Hotel, a Wisconsin transplant who carves poetry out of multisyllabics, scheming in micro-bursts and tightly woven yarns.
Last year, milo (whose real name is Rory Ferreira) released his refreshing debut album, a toothpaste suburb, which delivered wisecracks with a straight face, matching sharp barbs into sequences and carefully squeezing in references to Harry Potter, Jean Genet, Clementine Hunter, Kant, and Kim Kardashian—and that was just the opener. milo has a deadpan he uses to serve up witticisms that often double as smart jokes (and sometimes crude ones). Not all of his bars are one-liners, but they are all connected to at least one tangentially.
His latest album, so the flies don't come, is his most fascinating work to date, filling weird, side-winding productions that deflate and wheeze with tumbling lyricism delivered in near spoken word cadences. The project is entirely produced by electronic-leaning hip-hop producer Kenny Segal and the two have a real chemistry, with a shared inclination for the off-kilter and the oddball. Segal’s beats, synth-heavy abstractions that turn chords into cushions, make fitting soundbeds for milo’s staggered raps. Occasionally milo nestles into the sidewalls, like on "souvenir", and then quickly lurches out into pockets of dead space before retreating back. His blank, sometimes wooden demeanor is often betrayed by the snappiness of his writing, which somehow manages to capture Nietzche-esque nihilism with the comic simplicity of the shrugging emoticon.
milo has a knack for using quips as a lens through which to stare into the void, but his greatest strength lies in his very particular way with words. Songs like "an encyclopedia" and "napping under the Echo Tree" tell stories in their own language, something milo himself seems to understand; on the former, he opens, "No one taught me the language of rap song/ I was born speaking it." With such an innate understanding of rhythm and timing, it certainly sounds like it. His speech patterns vary, not so much abiding by the restraints of production as acknowledging them before ignoring them.
When milo isn’t playing around with funny phonetic sounds or fidgeting with tricky taunts, he’s just making flat out great hip-hop. The song "going no place" proves he’s capable of adhering to conventional rap standards with compact verses. On the closer, "song about a raygunn (an ode to Driver)", he gives a critical reading of aesthetics, something like a thesis: "Parse good from the nonsense/ Never let the form dictate what's the content/ It's never art for art's sake/ Despite whatever the corpse of a Marxist thinks." He closes the thought—and the album, with, "I guess I'm stupid/ Following a rule is just too hard for me/ It's hardly me." But if there’s one thing milo isn’t, it’s dumb. It’s his inability to follow the rules that makes his music so smart.
