inCulto in front of the Sabre Room.

The Sabre Room is a giant hall with a giant main ballroom. Atop the stage, a stage lit from below by blue and red lights, six gentlemen approach their instruments as their leader, Jurgis Didžiulis Valencia, announces the name of the band, inCulto, and promises that the group will be your "šokių daktarai" for the evening. It's not an idle boast, since by the end of the second set—after over two hours of performance, everyone will have danced their fill.

From his introduction, Didžiulis Valencia moves into the deathly ironic "Vanilla," a song that could be, with little effort, imagined as the first gesture of resistance to a punishing American culture of kitsch that oozes out of every crack of the Sabre Room, from the giant, functioning snow globe in the lobby, to the wedding chapel in the back, to the row of stained-glass sabres watching over the performance.

The first set, the audience later learns, is dedicated to the "panelės" in the audience. The second set will be for the boys, but in the meantime, inCulto tears through a series of driving, Latin-infused pop, where the lyrics are not just predominately, but practically exclusively in Spanish. The songs familiar to the audience from inCulto's LP, PostSovPop, get an added jolt of urgency in the live setting, backed now not just by Artūro Pranskūno drum machine and percussion, but also by Sergėjaus Makidon's explosive drums. Where a song like "Jei labai nori" on the album is a delicate, swaying pop confection, live it's a growling tiger, circling the steadily increasing number of hips shaking in front of the stage, culminating with a call-response from Makidon with the audience, signalled by Didžiulis Valencia in English with an exaggerated Colombian/Lithuanian stage accent.

Didžiulis Valencia demands a lot from his audience during the course of the show, and he asks the men and women in the audience to split vocal duties during the opening to "Mañana quizás," another chance for the inCulto  sound to develop a certain thickness on the support of Aurelijaus Morlenco bass and the bright accents of Nerijaus Laukaičio trombone and Aurimo Rimeikio trumpet. But this energetic performance collapses, leaving only a half familiar pinging of a synthesizer. As Didžiulis Valencia begins jogs our memory with the lyrics "ich liebe dich, du liebst mich nicht," my friend starts shouting "Da Da Da!" and the band lunges into their rendition of Trio's 1982 hit. But inCulto moved the song back into the latino context of the first set by effecting a seamless segue from "Da da da" to "Guantanamera," finished with a strong solo from Laukaitis.

The set closed with inCulto's offering to Eurovision, "Welcome (to Lithuania)." The crowd on the dancefloor surged to the stage, and carried the band along the song. After hearing that inCulto opened their show in Los Angeles with this song, it was pleasant to see it moved to a much more appropriate place—the end of the set devoted to the women in the audience. As a set-opener, the song frames the rest of the concert as a specifically "Lithuanian" experience. As set-closer, however, it leaves questions of geographical or ethnic comfort unanswered, unstable.

The boys' set—the second—was in a fashion far more straightforward. The band rocked much harder, opening with "You Don't Know," a showcase for Rimeikio trumpet. Next, they played their new song, "Something," a present given to their fans over the summer.

Didžiulis Valencia leads the dance competition.

There's a way in which, technically, there's far more to say about the second set—inCulto centered it with a nearly nine-minute performance of "Jurgeli, meistreli," which included a dance competition among the women onstage, for signed copies of PostSovPop as prizes. There was also a grand prize, a sweaty (and otherwise damp) t-shirt from Lietuvos Telekomas. Like most of the set until then, "Jurgeli, meistreli" is a driving song with strong funk influences, from a bassline that alternates between laziness to force, to a guitar part emphasising the percussive characteristics of the instrument. The dance competition itself occurred under Rimeikio floating trumpet (carried along with tons of reverb) and dueling percussion between Pranskūnas and Makidon.

As "Jurgeli, meistreli" ended, the Lebron Brothers Orchestra's sample of "Summertime Blues" started playing on the PA, and the crowd started shaking their "užpakaliukai" in anticipation of inCulto's superhit, "Boogaloo," the first Lithuanian song to ever have its video played on MTV. The performance elicited a response from the audience, begging for a reprise, and Didžiulis Valencia obliged the crowd (for the first of what would turn out to be many times), leading the group into an impromptu "160 bpm" (as he later described it) version of the song.

By this point of the concert, though, Pranskūno role in the concert grew more and more, as Makidon began competing on rhythmic duties with series of drum loops, including the top-heavy loop that introduced "Suk, suk ratelį," what was supposed to be the end of the second set. In the end, the band still had five songs to play. For the first encore, Didžiulis Valencia gave the audience a choice between "rock" and "latin." Rock won. From "It Must Rock," the band lunged into Technotronic's "Pump up the Jam" (leading me to whisper in the ear of my dance partner, "this was one of the most popular songs in the US when you were one.")

The band then dedicated a final song ("mūsų paskutinią, paskutiniausią dainą"), "La ñapa," to the women in the audience. Again they left the stage, only to absolutely bring the house down with a forboding, yet excellent, cover of Benny Benassi's "Satisfaction" before segueing into a reprise of "Suk, suk ratelį," this time accentuated with flourishes and loops from Pranskūnas. Before beginning, Didžiulis Valencia made it clear that the final two songs would be performed with a full expectation of the audience's dancing. The obligation was met on both sides.

It would probably not be a stretch to say that for the large majority of the crowd, the show was among the top concerts by Lithuanian performers that they had ever seen; as on PostSovPop, inCulto blends a winning showmanship with infectious grooves that guarantee an exciting performance. Though I can't (obviously) write fully critically about the concert, as I helped promote it, I hope that this description will have made everyone who wavered on going (before choosing to sit the show out) rather regretful. Nevertheless, the CDs of the show will be available, and there are YouTube clips floating among the InterTubes.