Concert Previews

The first edition of what intends to be the annual Philadelphia Film and Music Festival began Thursday and will continue all weekend. Musically, most of the key small venues in the city have stacked bills that match out-of-town indie acts with a choice selection of local bands.

There are too many to enumerate here - go to www. phillyfmfest.com for a complete listing. But here are a few Friday picks: At the Fire, fiercely rocking Indian American harmonium-playing New Jersey native Shilpa Ray and her band Happy Hookers share a bill with Mad Dragon Records folksters Toy Soldiers and jaunty Philadelphia psych-folk act Cheers Elephant. At Johnny Brenda's, British brothers Peter and David Brewis of jagged pop band Field Music headline a lineup that also includes formidable Philadelphia neoclassic rock sextet Blood Feathers. And at World Cafe Live, Philadelphia punk pranksters the Dead Milkmen join forces with Maxx Stoyanoff-Williams' funked-up hip-hop soul revue Black Landlord. - Dan DeLuca

Billed as "The Summer of Radness Finale," this Making Time event features a pair of bands that released two of this year's best albums. Sleigh Bells, the duo of Derek Miller and Alexis Krauss, traffic in terse, thunderous party chants on their debut,

Treats

. Miller's 10-ton beats and air-raid-siren guitars explode like fireworks behind Krauss' singsong, cheerleading vocals. James Murphy has claimed that

This Is Happening

, the third LCD Soundsystem album, will be his last. If so, he's going out without losing his edge, with another collection of meta-music that comments on hipster club culture while feeding it with undeniable, relentless dance tracks. The sold-out party has the added cachet of an unexpected venue: the Naval Cruise Terminal. Let the radness begin.

- Steve Klinge

Over the course of 10 years, several albums, and one collaborative effort with Prefuse 73, the Books have proved to be pop's most charmingly pleasant yet certainly surrealistic innovators of found sound and complex rhythm. Their meticulously displayed songs and merry melodies have often been called childlike. But 2010's

The Way Out

goes one step further. For the last five years the band has been collecting VHS tapes and eight-tracks, along with audio snippets of kids and adults. These they have wound, cut, and pasted throughout their songs, as in the frighteningly frenetic "A Cold Freezin' Night" or the harmoniously psychedelic "Beautiful People," and through their sumptuously arranged strings and daintily sung vocals. Their rhythms swell, crack, and kick, and often come across as a separate entity - as if two ensembles were fighting against each other in Jets-versus-Sharks battle. In a live setting, the Books' pulses shape-shift the most, driving their trippy, cheery tunes into gleeful, pounding madness. Gloom-country ensemble the Black Heart Procession is nothing to sneeze at when it comes to elegant noise and manic rhythm. Its newest EP,

Blood Bunny/Black Rabbit

, is laced with contributions from dub god Lee Scratch Perry and some of the spookiest melodies of BHP's career.

- A.D. Amorosi