Urthboy’s solo debut was a long time in the making well before he committed Distant Sense of Random Menace to disc on 2004. The Sydney MC’s extensive background in and around Australian hip-hop as a performer, producer and label head all but ensured his first outing would be anything but ordinary—an ordinariness that Urthboy is quick to denigrate. Distant Sense of Random Menace’s curious title is best embodied by “Keep It Relevant”’s collapsing sleaze and faraway synths, with Urthboy surfacing the winding road his debut walks by firing warning shots at what he perceives to be the hollowness of the day’s hip-hop. At one point he even reserves, without comment, that “Surely we don’t need another half-arsed, brain-dead, well-dressed, breastfed, volume-annoying MC.” From the unbelievably musical stabs ’n accents of “Come Around” and “Heavy People”, Urthboy’s atypical live-band pedigree by way of his time co-founding The Herd helps to push away the predictable. Topically, Distant Sense of Random Menace mostly trades the overt politicking of Urthboy’s band-at-large for stream-of-conscious narratives about daily life (single “No Rider”) and the need to cherish said daily life (“Sink In”)—mostly. You can take the boy out of the band, but you can’t take the band out of “Media’d Out”’s numbed concern for the world or closer “The Last Chance”—a slinky rumination on fleeting love co-vocalised with fellow The Herd MC, Ozi Batla.