Crooked Beat sent along a list of the Adams Morgan stores top-ten sellers for May. I pass it along not so much for its tiny news value as merely a reminder. Maybe you’re like me and totally slept on the new Camera Obscura album (it’s….No. 1 at Crooked Beat). Or maybe you still do not own Neutral Milk Hotel’s classic (No. 9).

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Musical inspiration and theft often go hand in hand, but most of the time the crimes tend to be immaterial—a lifted chord progression or a borrowed melody. The theft that kicked off AB’s Original Breaks, however, is not the sort of thing that could be explained away as homage.

“I had a laptop stolen from me,” says drummer Andrew Black. “And when I bought a new laptop I decided that since I’m around ProTools so much, I should learn it. So, I started re-tracking all of these drum breaks that I had been playing and cataloging them.”

Black took four of these breaks—minute-and-a-half percussion grooves with minimal instrumentation meant to be sampled by hip-hop artists—and pressed them to a 7” single, dubbing the project AB’s Original Breaks. They’re up-tempo and lightly funky, the kind of thing that might have been snatched out of the middle of a James Brown tune. “I sit down and I try to play them and see if it feels like people would want to move to it,” says Black. “I like to play at about the speed of the human heartbeat—90 bpm. A lot of my favorite go-go is at about 90-95 bpm.”
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Link Wray looking supercool.

Crooked Beat sent along this e-mail with a list of new arrivals at their shop. Includes Link Wray, the Wedding Present, and the new Animal Collective LP.

List after the jump.

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Got the latest list of new arrivals at Red Onion. They got the new Beirut LP (actually two EPs), a bunch of Numero stuff, this Elder Utah Smith CD that looks killer, plus the usual awesome finds.

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Hume’s Phat Daughter String Quartet, subject of this One Track Mind, is finally out and available for purchase. The 12″ record includes a suite of four compositions on the a-side backed by dub versions of those same pieces on the flip. I had thought the b-side would be kind of disposable–that it would sound like somebody playing a Final Fantasy video game through a delay pedal. Not the case though! Hume’s Britton Powell deftly splices the quartet into some heavy reggae riddims, sounds kind of like Arvo Part paying a visit to Black Ark.

Pick it up here.

Here’s a couple of sample clips:

Hume & the Phat Daughter Quartet: “Oneirnaut”

Hume & the Phat Daughter Quartet: “Oneirnatty”

Hey, what a nice package!

Oh! I apologize, that wasn’t a come-on. I was just examining this Hey Girl comic book/7″. Carefully assembled by illustrator/songwriter Erin McCarley (ex-Problems), Hey Girl takes a multimedia approach–including drawings, songs, and elegantly silk-screened cover art–to addressing male-douchebaggery in its myriad insidious guises.

“Oh Jesus, really? I don’t want to have your baby,” sings McCarley on weary piano ballad “The End”, expressing an exhaustion/disdain that will not be unfamiliar to any young lady who has spent a week night sitting around at The Black Cat’s Red Room opting out of lascivious and undesired advances. Andy Gale (The Shirks, Haram) not only contributes drums, but also shows off his impressive acting chops by giving voice to said creeps and cads.

You can order Hey Girl online here or here, but copies will also be on sale at Crooked Beat Records and Black Cat’s upcoming “Rock n’ Shop” event.

I was over at Crooked Beat tonight. Jeez. They got in a huge shipment of reggae LPs. More than a hundred LPs in total. Way more. I saw Jackie Mittoo classics, King Tubby, Lee “Scratch” Perry, Delroy Wilson, Burning Spear, Alton Ellis, and tons of Studio One stuff.

So get over there.