Philadelphia Weekly

King Khan & the Shrines

They've got the best of '60s psych and '60s soul, with a tune bearing strong resemblance to the B-52's "Love Shack" break thrown in for good measure ("On the door, baby!"). The band's leader is a 1970s Canadian-born, Berlin-residing Indian, and this odd combination of race, ethnicity and decades creates some impressive sounds. Fuzzed guitars, lots of tambourine, backup singers and deliciously lo-fi recording mesh with soul screams, brassy trumpets, wiggling guitar melodies and driving boogie beats. The nine-piece band's stage show is a mess of James Brown antics, yowling brass and maybe even a pompom-wielding cheerleader or two. (Katherine Silkaitis

Endless Boogie

Named after a John Lee Hooker album and inspired by any number of heavy blues acts, Brooklyn's Endless Boogie bring both a dirty cool and scholarly determination to their first album Focus Level, out now on Philly's esoteric No Quarter imprint. Paul Major's lecherous grunt of a singing voice would be morbidly thrilling even if there weren't such mighty sprawl in its close company. But there is, and songs like "Executive Focus" and "Low-Lifes" cruise past the 10-minute mark almost without us noticing. Fans of Chavez (whose Matt Sweeney guests on Focus Level) and Royal Trux--not to mention early ZZ Top and dirtier Stones--will especially be floored. (Doug Wallen)

Times New Viking

It's a sweaty thrashing mess with Japanese horror movie chick hair and a tightly tucked-in striped purple shirt, and it gives me a hard-on a cat couldn't scratch. Times New Viking's enchantingly filthy mix of lovely boy/girl trade-off vocals, postapoc surf rock and horny organ blasted through a teetering Marshall stack the size of a giant's thigh bone will rupture your eardrums, even if you have your computer speakers set to the levels you use to watch porn while your wife is sleeping in the next room. This bodes well. It's twee gone dirty, distorted and dangerous. (Steven Wells)

Black Angels + Warlocks

Their names conjure mystical '60s acid-psych like that of the Seeds and the Electric Prunes. The guitars are thick and sultry like the air in a sweatlodge, soaked in reverberating distortion and saturated hum. They favor "Venus in Furs"-style Velvets, with primal, shamanistic drone driving through the smoky haze of Spacemen 3's resinous remains. The decade-old Warlocks' latest Heavy Deavy Skull Lover spins more toward shoegazing, particularly on the delicate J&MC sweep of "So Paranoid." The younger Black Angels' second disc Direction to See a Ghost improves on their terrific debut, maintaining their garage grit amid spiraling, stereoscopic guitar plumage that hides resilient buds of melody and hooks. (Chris Parker)

Polymer

"The night has never felt so alive," Polymer declare as only an optimistic young band can on "Night on Fire," an empowering self-starter off their 2006 album Start to Move. You have to admire the local five-piece's moxie, especially considering how well it fits their tightly wound gloss-punk, which arcs and crashes in all the right places. And even if that same tendency toward drama can seem a little overwrought in Ben Weldon's heartfelt singing, you also must admire Polymer for headlining this four-band benefit show for Philabundance. It doubles as the release show for their new EP, which ought to find the band much matured and tighter still. (D.W.)

Grails

History hasn't been kind to instrumental rock bands. Perhaps this is due to the overwhelming tendency for these vocally challenged bands to start out strong (think Tangerine Dream) and end up unbearably bad (hold that thought). Portland, Ore.'s Grails are of a new breed. Grails have figured out how to consistently improve while writing technically challenging work that also appeals to a growing audience. If the guys in Tortoise weren't so busy sucking their own dicks, maybe they might've taken the time to write material half as engaging as Grails. Or, you know, maybe not. (John Cramer)

Silver Apples

In the 1960s Simeon Coxe III strapped electronic World War II oscillators onto his appendages and used their repetitive sounds--along with drummer Danny Taylor's beats--to create weird, freaky psych music. Things were going well for the band until they took some leeway in the photo shoot for 1969's Contact and filled a PanAm cockpit with drug paraphernalia and superimposed plane wreckage on the inner sleeve. PanAm sued, and the band went into hiding. The end. The band reunited in the mid-'90s, and Coxe broke his neck. He recovered slightly, but Taylor died. Now Coxe plays solo. See him before the band's nine lives are up. (K.S.)

Mission of Burma

In the movie The Natural Robert Redford plays Roy Hobbs, a baseball prodigy whose career is derailed in his youth due to health reasons (he got shot), yet comes back nearly two decades later to win his team a pennant in dramatic, lightning-punctuated fashion. Boston post-punk legends Mission of Burma are Roy Hobbs' musical equivalent: Their initial four-year run cut short in 1983 (due mainly to frontman Roger Miller's tinnitus), the blistering-yet-melodic quartet improbably reemerged in the 2000s with the amazing albums OnOffOn and The Obliterati, proving they were just as good, perhaps better, than the first go-around. Tonight they'll be playing 1981's Signals, Calls and Marches in its entirety (plus other songs), and there's zero doubt this show will be a home run.