Kaleidoscope

Let's do it like Bell Curve: Brooklyn (-2) three-girl (+5) group The Shalitas got its start singing backup for Marah (-1). They can make things bluesy and sultry (+3), but mostly they do really sweet, Mowtowny pop (+7), where everybody sings (+3) and the world seems bright and beautiful (+9). They're playing the M Room (+6) on Saturday (Aug. 14, themanhattanroom.com). Oh yeah, they also just got nominated for an Emmy (+1?) for a song featured in a commercial for the Mets (-978,959,391,393).

The films of Paul Sharits don't seem to enter a viewer's consciousness through the eyes so much as explode from the brain itself. Even in the relatively lyrical Apparent Motion, there's a sense of concussive bursts of light and frantically firing synapses. The 1975 film, one of three to be screened during I-House's retrospective Friday (Aug. 13, ihousephilly.org), plays with kaleidoscopic layers of color which combine into a frenzy of movement, television static dancing into a multidimensional Rorschach.

With the launch of their brand-new studio and fancy salon digs in Fairmount, the folks at The Lightroom (lightroom.org) have cause to celebrate. Up all month at 3rd Street Gallery, "Redux" showcases work from nine longtime members of the Philly photography co-op including Tony Rocco, Al Wachlin Jr. and Sean Wholey. Look also for Tom Sheeder Jr.'s raw, frenzied study of closing time at a Japanese fish market, and Ronald Corbin's intimate, haunting portraits of strangers.

This Monday's buzzy three-fer at Johnny Brenda's (Aug. 16, johnnybrendas.com) should offer future ethnomusicologists a decent snapshot of musical hipdom c. 2010, from the clean-picked indie jangle of Brooklyn's Beach Fossils to the hazy, vocal-centric guitarscapes and Cat-Powered Motown interpolations of L.A.'s Warpaint. Meanwhile Javelin, whose No Más is one of the year's most delightful and consummately listenable full-lengths, threatens to circumvent the entire ethnographic equation, cycling through scavenged samples and stylistic non sequiturs with sufficient glee to outpace any hope of systematic analysis.