“Are you still with us?” Starsailor’s lead singer, James Walsh, asks towards the end of his band’s debut LA performance. Rapturous applause and cheers followed to which Walsh responded, “good, because we’re going to play a few AC/DC covers on the banjo, then we’re going to have The Actual Tigers (the support band) bring out some actual tigers to eat you all.”

Alas, the tigers remained in the zoo and AC/DC was nowhere to be heard, but at least Walsh has a sense of humor. What we did get was a good, occasionally great, show from the current British band to be most hotly tipped. Starsailor are this year’s Coldplay, who were last year’s Travis, who were the year before that’s Radiohead, and so on.

Ever since Brit Pop hit the big time (so to speak) in the mid ‘90s, we’ve had one slightly disappointing UK next big thing after another hoisted upon us. Oasis, Blur and The Verve sited old school influences like The Beatles, The Kinks and Can. These new British bands are clearly as much influenced by mid ‘90s Brit Pop as they are by Jeff Buckley. Thus, we get The Beatles filtered through Oasis to Embrace, for example.

Starsailor formed in The Verve’s hometown of Wigan and could be named after The Verve song Starsail, although they claim to have gotten their moniker from Tim Buckley’s Starsailor album.They manage to transcend some of the pratfalls of the Nu Acoustica Brit Pop wannabes currently mounting an invasion, partly due to the power of Walsh’s Jeff Bucklyesque voice. Although, tonight Walsh may disagree with that statement, as he’s continually down on himself and says his voice is shit due to the heat. After one fan screams, “ yeah, that was fabulous!” Walsh replies, “your screaming was better.” Later Walsh says such things as “I left my singer at home,” and “I’m half asleep and I don’t know what I’m doing.”

Walsh needn’t worry so much as the industry heavy crowd was more than appreciative. They Those fans that did manage to get in sang along to songs like ‘Fever’ and the piano backed ‘Alcoholic,’ even though the band’s only released a couple of singles in the UK and the debut album isn’t due until later this year.

The band didn’t rock out quite as much as you’d like them to, which is the same problem Coldplay had at their LA debut at the Mayan; at least Travis knows how to rock. Also, Walsh’s some-times poetic ‘been damaged by love’ lyrics are never as strong as almost anything Richard Ashcroft wrote in his Verve years. Still, some lines did resonate.

In the middle of the set, Walsh played two near beautiful sounding solo acoustic numbers while the rest of the four piece took a break, which was a nice surprise. They were all set to wrap things up after a soaring rendition of their catchiest single, ‘Good Souls,’ but decided to play one more before walking off not to return for an encore. In short, believe some of the hype, just not all of it.