Kaleidoscope

My my hey hey, retro-soul is here to stay. Five years after the Winehouse watershed, the novelty factor's finally wearing off but the musical caliber of the '60s soul revival is growing steadily stronger. (I'd say 2009's surprise rookie MVP Mayer Hawthorne represents the current high-water mark.) Boston's Eli "Paperboy" Reed and his seven-strong True Loves look like a lock for this year's title (apologies to Sharon Jones), with a forthcoming third LP, Come and Get It (Capitol), that plays like a killer set of Wilson Pickett and Tyrone Davis obscurities, and a reportedly explosive live show to match. Reed and company play the North Star Friday (June 11, northstarbar.com).

Faces painted, keyboards droning, voices echoing and cooing like a poltergeist kindergarten — Pocahaunted is a pretty scary band to behold. But these California girls still conjure up enough hooks and beats and intelligible words (once in a while) to keep you in sight of the terrestrial plane. Pocahaunted will haunt the shit out of Kung Fu Necktie on Tuesday (June 15, kungfunecktie.com).

Tonight marks the last of the Live Arts Second Thursday Series (June 10, livearts-fringe.org) before the entire Philadelphia arts community begins its sacred summerlong Fringe preparation ritual. Don't miss Jaamil Kosoko's Or Maybe My Mother Was an American Chameleon? — a dance/theater/spoken-word work-in-progress that'll première in full this September. Kosoko tells me it's "a work that personifies our country, imagining her as a schizophrenic, depressed, strong but beautifully ill, manic, mothering creature with a hard history." If that won't get you there, maybe this will: It's free, and there's booze.

The title of Dave Tompkins' history of the vocoder, How To Wreck a Nice Beach (Stop Smiling Books), is not, in fact, an old-school hip-hop lyric but a speech-recognition trope (say "how to recognize speech" reeeeeeeal slow). It's a fascinating look at how a device invented for military coding/decoding applications became a go-to musical tool for the likes of Kraftwerk and Afrika Bambaataa. And any book with an appendix titled "It's not the end of the world: Some final thoughts on Auto-Tune" gets a robotic hellz yeah from us.