While OMB Peezy’s debut album, last year’s Loyalty Over Love, was a sort of personalized therapy, this is almost instructional, a running inner-monologue on the keys to making it out and subsequently dealing with withdrawal symptoms that come with not knowing anything else. Peezy has spent most of his life somewhere in the middle of two things—Mobile, Alabama and Sacramento, California, a burgeoning rapper and hustler—and on Preacher to the Streets, he is seeking a more balanced discourse between the angel and the devil on his shoulders.
His style is betwixt and between—a bonding of regional touchstones from Northern California to the deep South. He’s signed to E-40, a student of Juvie and Boosie. More recently, he’s found himself somewhere amid the spring of post-hyphy and the Auto-Tuned warbling of Atlanta trap. The pained howls of his nasally drawl lend themselves to the unnerving sense of doom in his lyrics, which can be subtly complex and are usually piercingly direct, to a point of near discomfort for the squeamish listener. On “Soul Bleed” he yowls passionately, “I’m from a city where the murder rate through the roof/I’ma put it on for the trenches where it’s either get shot or shoot.”
At his most reassuring, OMB Peezy is a cynic. At his more fatalistic, he’s unapologetically nefarious, resigned to his fate to suffer the hell of perpetual violence. He has often written from a place of paranoia and isolation, but personal ordeals, like getting shot after a show in his hometown, have driven him from the honor-bound street code of Loyalty Over Love toward the shoot-first mentality of “Treacherous.” This is not who he wants to be but it’s what the world has made him (“Goin’ down the wrong road and I forgot the way back”), and Peezy spends most of the album conscience-stricken trying to explain the difference between being immoral and being corrupted.
For instance, when partnered with Sada Baby, on his Detroit detour “On Me,” there is a clear delineation between someone shooting for fun and someone like Peezy shooting back to avoid an early death. Peezy grew up around extensions and that’s why he rides with them now; meanwhile, Sada is all the way in England still trapping off a flip phone with five choppers—“and I’ma shoot all them bitches, on my mama,” he raps, excitedly. The latter is a remorseless, thrill-seeking delinquent, the former is a reluctant sinner cornered in a life he wants no part of anymore. It’s a distinction Peezy makes early on, during “Soul Bleed”: “Robbin’ for some food to eat, you robbed ‘cause it was cool.” Though it is to somewhat diminishing returns here, this is the core of OMB Peezy’s appeal; he is a good rapper, to be sure, but he is a remarkable exponent of hood gospel.
The faceless characters that fade in and out of his stories are judged by their willingness to stand by those they have pledged their allegiances to, and his raps are commendations for the resilient few who never fold or broadsides aimed at turncoats. This philosophy suits his raps well; his writing sprawls out in fits and starts as if under the stresses of suspicion and anxiety. He is constantly looking over his shoulder and spelling out the nature of impending threats. The sense is that this death calculus has kept him alive this long but also threatens to alienate him in a way that is just as dangerous. “You can teach ‘em how to cook and they still gon’ watch your plate,” he grumbles on “I’m Straight,” flipping the old proverb about teaching a man to fish into a pessimistic street parable.
Perhaps a bit weighed down by that pessimism, Preacher to the Streets never reaches the intense, often gratifying epiphanies of OMB Peezy’s debut and finds him closer to square one, both emotionally and as a songmaker. Despite dubbing himself a street preacher he is decidedly even less of a storyteller on this installment, opting instead to rely entirely on his ability to convey a truly chaotic and solitary mental state. On “Struggle,” Peezy raps, “You in that struggle, I know it’s hard to make it out, nigga, but look/Keep on grinding, promise you gon’ make it out, nigga,” as if trying to usher others passed a finish line he has already crossed. But they feel a bit like empty words when you realize the doctrine OMB Peezy is preaching is one he himself has yet to apply.
