SAN FRANCISCO--Grand Ole Party.

That's the full name of the GOP, the political party that controlled the federal government for most of the past seven years.

In an incendiary, two-hour set at the Great American Music Hall here last night, Brooklyn-based Afrobeat orchestra Antibalas suggested a slew of potential alternatives in the song "Filibuster X": Greedy Old People, Guilty of Perjury, and Gas Oil & Petroleum, to name a few.

The 12-piece band also fed the mind and spirit of the 600-deep crowd, parking itself at the intersection of political commentary and dance-floor-filling jazz and funk. This was two hours of middle-finger-in-the-air protest music with a funky lacquer, set to the beat of West African high-life rhythms and a marching band's worth of horns.

In town to support their new album, Security, Antibalas began the night with "Filibuster X," which name-checks and dishes out verbal abuse to everybody from Bill Frist to Dick Cheney. Another new tune, "Beaten Metal," was up next, an experimental track that gives a nod to the scrap-metal percussiveness of Congo's Konono No. 1.

Despite having played eight gigs in four days at SXSW last week, the band was energized, delivering soaring horn solos and call-and-response chants over a pulsating rhythm on their 2005 song, "Government Magic."

Antibalas also whipped up some unconventional covers, including a rousing rendition of Bob Marley's "Rat Race," which upped the tempo considerably on the reggae track. The band also performed "Ikoyi Blindness," one of the more obscure tracks from Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, the Afrobeat pioneer on whom Antibalas bases its sound.

Led by saxophonist Stuart Bogie, who serves as sort of the traffic cop for the live arrangements, the band's five-piece horn section dominated much of the night. But Victor Axelrod's keyboard work was stunning at times, acting in tandem with the rhythm section to push the songs in a new direction at every turn.

Almost every one of the band's songs are pointed, but it doesn't get any more direct than "Indictment," on which Bogie declares "order in the court" and calls for indictments for an array of government figures.

Sandwiched last night between the ever-danceable "Che Che Cole" and "Talkatif," which closed out the set, "Indictment" featured a shuddering, frenetic rhythm that got even crazier as a spastic Bogie started denouncing the likes of Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.

The song served as the perfect synopsis of the night: politically in your face and rhythmically up your a**.