Hip Hop/Rap: Psalm One, Live in Concert, Shank Hall, Milwaukee, WI, May 12, 2005

Opening for John Brown’s Body at the May 12th Milwaukee show was Psalm One, a rapper from Chicago, accompanied by DJ Spontaneous from the Vinyl Addicts. Psalm One did her best for the early crowd of wallflowers/barflowers. She mentioned after the show that she was just pleased to get some response from a crowd of people who didn’t come to see her and had never heard of her—a humble approach in what often seems to be a prideful genre.


In fact, Psalm One’s raps often dip into humility as on her most recent album, Bio:Chemistry II: esters and essays. The opening track, “A Girl Named You,” is a honest confession before the Lord. In “Dubblewood Pipe,” she says, “I’ll never go platinum with this one, but it’s cool, though./If you listenin’ to this, God bless you.”

At Shank Hall, her organic sound tended towards a muscle heavy plodding rhythm on the first songs. However, Psalm One finds her stride when she sings it out more using the melodic sections to break up the straight-up raps. When she says, “I sit in my room and listen to Al Green,” with DJ Spontaneous cueing up Green’s croon, then you hear the soulful side of Psalm One. “Simply Beautiful” uncorked some strong, R&B/soul flavored raps.

On “East to West,” Psalm One gets a little too hard core heavy on the raps for her own good, although Spontaneous shined in the scratches. Instead, it’s that soul-jazz vibe heard under the Fast Twista Chicago-style raps that beautifies Psalm One’s raps.

Bio:Chemistry II is worth repeated spins. “A Girl Named You” tells the tale of how a girl can go from church to street, the slide in and out of faith. “Dubblewood Pipe” is just about one of the best sounding rhythmic phrases I’ve heard in awhile. The soul sounds spin the disco ball for “On and On” and “Sugar.” “You Should Know That” steps in with a little jazz flute sample. Then the acoustic guitar/bass vamp on “How Silhouette Got Out” grows out from the “Fat Albert” theme—a fun theme that breaks down into that vamp just in time to tell the story of the girl Silhouette who “likes to kill Gigapets and smoke cigarettes.”

The live set included “I Think Too Much,” where Psalm One did a great job of getting the small crowd to join in on the chorus, “You think too much/Yeah, you know that’s right/You drink too much/No, but a beer would be nice.” The original version was dropped from Bio:Chemistry II, replaced by “Think 2 Much (Remix)” which doesn’t have the same sing-along quality—a little disappointing considering that the song’s a good memory from the show.

By the way, Psalm One counted off a few too many times during the show saying, “1 for the treble, 2 for the bass. . .,” and yet, one of the best lines on the album is, “She went 1 tequila, 2 tequila, 3 tequila, floor” (“Where’d You Come From?”). Keepin’ clever, keepin’ it soulful will do Psalm One well.

Thanks to Psalm One and Birthwrite Records for the review copy.