Dancing lessons came at midnight as La Mirasoul from La Santa Cecilia dolloped fountains of sweet honey from her lungs, clutching the lip overhanging La Cita’s comically small stage and brandishing the microphone like a machete.  The crowd was fervid and Mirasoul peered over them through her somewhat sacred horn-rimmed glasses.  I was sequestered in the back, attempting the role of passive observer, balancing on the rickety floor.  This was not meant to be a passive scene, though, and a white t-shirt and a rolling belly called me on my shit.  “You move your legs,” he said, “and then you go forwards and then backwards and then you go to the side and then forwards again and your arms go up like this,” as he pulled phantom levers above his head, smiling, his belly poking out in rhythm.  “You’ve got to move.”

This seems to be the manifesto of Mucho Wednesdays, celebrating its second birthday of unbridled Latin pop.  By nine, La Cita’s patio was shoulder to shoulder.  Inside, not sated by their freshly silkscreened t-shirts (accordion or security camera, a dilemma. In the end, the accordions seemed to win out, less blatantly political, maybe) or the bean-cheap Tecate, the crowd, still dancing to the DJ despite the tangible impatience, clustered close to the stage.  When Echo Park’s Wait. Think. Fast. climbed aboard and took the reins, explosions rocketed backwards through the crowd and Jacqueline Santillan pined and longed and grasped desperately upward, her voice riding ghostly waves.  The band spins a glittering tempestuous type of pop, owing much to the glowing doom of post-punk, but constantly overriding any possibility of stale ennui with lusty detonations and bounding, unstoppable rhythms.  The necessity of dancing is implied and understood.  Once infected, the steaming crowd could not be contained: as Wait. Think. Fast. wound down, before their final song ended, requests for an encore murmured and echoed through La Cita, from the patio forward.  When they obliged, legs moved, forward and backward and then to the side.

—Gerard Olson