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Holy Fuck play the sort of id-gripping dance rock that's best experienced in person -- and not just because the pulsing, kraut-rock-meets-D.C. go-go jams sound massive on a club PA. Eschewing laptops, programming, and rehearsals, HF improvise electronic music on (mostly) analog sources, including 35-millimeter film projectors and ancient keyboards.

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"There must be something wrong with me," sings Max Bemis in "The Word You Wield," one of 27 songs on the two-disc sophomore album by his Los Angeles-based band. As you might expect, the tune is about girl trouble: "Why am I surprised you're giving up on me?" he wonders, as his ex slips into a cab and out of his life.

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A fragile, wavering voice swaddled in shimmering synths that recall a particularly bittersweet flavor of European '80s dance pop obscure to American ears -- this is Sally Shapiro. She doesn't perform, give in-person interviews, or reveal her real name. Instead, she offers a love that can burn away the darkness of a lonely heart. Even her missed notes are poetic and genre-specific.

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Sigur Rós are hardly renowned for marketing savvy -- the title of their third album was a pair of parentheses, thus rendering it only slightly less pronounceable than their 1999 breakthrough, Ágætis Byrjun. But this double album of live and unreleased songs feels cosmically overdue.

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The Berlin-based duo of Arno Kammermeier and Walter Merziger up the sonic intrigue on tracks by Heaven 17, Aphex Twin, Carl Craig, the Tubes (!), and others with their gospeldeep, elegantly wood-toned beats.

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Through four albums of dark, existential art metal, Tool have cast a spooky shadow, but the underlying truth about the band (and frontman Maynard James Keenan) is that they're pretty cheeky. Ænima featured a big single about fisting, a nod to acerbic comic Bill Hicks, and "Die Eier Von Satan," whose lyrics sound like a Nazi salvo but are really a recipe for cookies.