With electronic dance music seemingly stuck in a rut, more enterprising souls have started looking to the past for inspiration. Gotan Project meld modern electro with traditional tango, with significant commercial success. Orishas have a more streetwise approach, as a Cuban hip-hop outfit with one eye trained on the sun and salsa-loving Buena Vista Social Club audience.

The band are very much on the ascent, and the Wardrobe in Leeds is packed to the rafters. The crowd don't seem to care, whooping as the musicians hit the stage in a riot of elegant goatees, headscarves, flashing earrings and black silk shirts.

Orishas are an intriguing mixed bag; a scratch DJ provides crackling Latin-flavoured beats while a traditional Cuban percussionist demonstrates his virtuosity on an arsenal of timbales and congas. Singer Roldan Rivera looks like a more imposing Craig David, while warbling amorously like a lustier Ibrahim Ferrer. Finally, rappers Ruzzo and Yotuel take charge of all the streetwise stuff, doing hackneyed hip-hop wrist flicks, leaning conspiratorially on each other's shoulders and gabbling rhythmically in Spanish.

As a party band they are a brilliant success. Girls shriek, boys join the hand-waving and middle-aged couples somehow find room to practise their salsa dancing. On a musical level the group take hip-hop to new places, using unconventional time signatures and playing constantly with the metrical relationship between the bass and snare drums. Their tunes, meanwhile, are delivered with an irresistible combination of melancholy and sophistication.

A slightly claustrophobic maleness does become apparent after a while, and the group's macho antics could do with a bit of female undercutting. Is there really no role for a woman or two in a sexy young Cuban hip-hop outfit?

· At the Anson Rooms, Bristol (0870 444 4400), tonight, then touring.