Chop Suey was dark, smoky, and crowded last Tuesday, the air thick with lingering fog from opening act A Place to Bury Strangers' disappointingly quiet, strobe-lit (and fog-machine-assisted) set of gothic shoegaze. Headlining the show was Toronto quartet Holy Fuck, who were just in town some weeks earlier opening for Super Furry Animals at Neumo's. Certain tardy music critics missed that set, so this encore was greatly appreciated.

Holy Fuck comprises a bassist, a drummer, and two guys manning tables of electronic junk, pedals, and cheap keyboards. Their set began with pinging sonar sounds, then gave way to muscular motorik bass and drum grooves, the adept rhythm section locked tight while the band's other two members warmed up their electronic arrays. Occasionally, one of the hunching knob-twiddlers would bark through a microphone into some kind of delay.

The mics were clearly not set up for clean signals—when they later paused to thank the crowd and talk about their last stop through town, everything after "thanks" was more or less a garbled mess, as was everything after "Vancouver" when they tried to tell some anecdote about that town. For the next song, another mic provided stuttering vocoder vocals. The guy at stage left pulled loops of magnetic tape out of some analog tape echo like taffy, occasionally turning a crank on the side of the machine, or else flossing the tape back and forth to produce almost-record scratches. Their live rhythm section is incredibly hot, tight, and taut in one place, loose and funky in another, casually shifting from propulsive stretches to cool breaks.

The band again and again built up these teetering, expectant moments that crested into serotonin-flooding breaks—it's one trick, the central trick of so much dance/electronic music, but Holy Fuck totally nail it. It occurs to me that the band's naughty name probably helps a lot of their fans get down with their more proggy and techy elements, but it's the band's stunning show that got the crowd dancing and bopping like total goofs (it was a joyously dorky dance floor). Looped 16th notes heated up into white-glowing noise, tinny tinkling turned into steel drums, the drummer switched from half to double time, backward synth sweeps and Future World synths mingled with strutting, walking bass lines. At times, it was like Tussle with more junk; at other times, it was like Black Dice or Wolf Eyes trying to make dance music, right down to the half-swallowed mics held in their mouths.

At one point during their closer, the gorgeous glissando-stringed "Lovely Allen," the tape-tugging guy looked up across the table at his bandmate, mouth agape, smiling, like even he couldn't believe the awesome, triumphant sounds they were making. The crowd cheered them back out for an encore, a groovy jam that couldn't quite eclipse "Allen," but was fun enough on its own. recommended

egrandy@thestranger.com