When Matisyahu and his fellow worshipers at Brooklyn’s Karliner synagogue talk to God, they belt it out. They scream. The same could be said of his music. He embraced Orthodox Judaism only as a teenager, after discovering reggae, which he treats in anything but stereotypical fashion: no talk of Jah or rolling blunts the size of bread loaves. Instead, his breakthrough 2004 album Shake Off the Dust . . . Arise is all about religion and clean living. He sings, “You’re all that I have and all that I need, each and every day I pray to get to know you please.” (And he’s talking about G-d, not trying to make some girl.) Matisyahu doesn’t perform on the Sabbath, and when he does appear on stage, he sports the full Hasidic getup—the hat, the beard, the coat—while spitting rhymes like Barrington Levy. He’s currently on tour behind 2006’s Youth, a much more rock-themed disc than Shake Off the Dust, and is supposedly at work on his third studio album, Escape, to be released sometime this year. Paramount Theatre, 911 Pine St., 467-5510, www.theparamount.com. $32. 7:30 p.m. JESSE FROEHLING

Mon., July 28, 7:30 p.m., 2008