Album Review: Urthboy - The Past Beats Inside Me Like A Second Heartbeat

"Baby! Ba-baby! I'm all alone!" This searing, chipmunk squeak of a sample opens Urthboy's fifth album. It's the pulse of lead track Long Loud Hours, a reflection on John Killick and his girlfriend Lucy Dudko's anti-heroic, deeply passionate prison break. Condensing the cocktail of emotions that come with an event like this is a singular achievement. Few other rappers, if any, would be capable of it.

As Urthboy's past beats inside him like a second heartbeat, so does his past beat within us. No local rap act has maintained our attention so consistently for so long. Urthboy is the constant from the experimental late '90s, the Culture Of Kings-defined early 2000s, the maturation we saw in the late 2000s, and the splintering of the scene we see today. Little Girl's Dad is a good microcosm for how he's done it: a complex idea (how do you raise a daughter and confront the patriarchy?) defined simply ("You ain't daddy's little girl, I'm a little girl's dad.") and delivered pitch perfectly. Running Into The Flames features a B Wise polemic. It's an eloquent example of the performances our host extracts from the people around him: B Wise, like many before him, is elevated merely by sharing the track with Tim Levinson.

Wade In the Water, the closer, is probably the album's highlight. Epic love, bushfires, abandoned cricket matches, the Blue Mountains, surprisingly violent tempo switches — they're all here. And they round out another virtuoso performance from our host.