This Is Book’s Music

Preach Jacobs has been traveling quite a bit since his last release, including a successful trip to Japan. His time abroad has moved him to reflect and get lyrically deeper. This, from a guy who is easily one of the more gifted MC’s out today, and it’s basically another way of saying he continues to show the strength and power of his last album, while showing the progress of someone with a lot of promise as an artist.

Maple St. Sessions (R2) is an EP that brings Preach together with producer Denz to create music that doesn’t only represent hip-hop, it is hip-hop, looking at all of the different characters, personas, and real people that he acknowledges in a track like “Thank You”. He even works out a club-type track called “Cool Out”, but it’s not a song that you want to end up suffocating in stale air, it’s a plea for people to relax and just chill, whatever the situation. In “Forest Whitaker” he’ll deliver with a quick verse, only for Denz to flip the beat as if it’s making a temporary pit stop, only for him to rev it up back to its normal speed. Both of them are people you want to listen to, as they help you get caught up in their formulas so you’ll know exactly what they’re talking about (and yes, Denz is talking, in a musical sense). A 7-song EP may seem short, but if EP’s are the way of releasing music in 2009, I want more EP’s. Those who still put faith in MC’s to drop their own level of science, you can now put on a lab coat because class is in session.

(Maple St. Sessions will be released on October 27th, and you can pre-order it from UndergroundHipHop.com.)