When The Dears made their UK debut in October with No Cities Left, it seemed, first and foremost, like an opportunity to shift some old Britpop cassettes.

With startling versatility, singer and songwriter Murray Lightburn invoked the Cockney camp of Bowie in Don't Lose The Faith, the arch-eyebrowed croon of Neil Hannon in Who Are You, pure Damon Albarn in Never Destroy Us and, on Lost In The Plot, a surprising face-off between the Morrissey lilt and the Brett Anderson whine.

Here was a musical ventriloquist who, peculiarly for a black guy from Montreal, displayed a decided specialism in Britpop.

But, when you got their record out of the bedsits and onto the stage, it turned out The Dears weren't copyists at all.

Striking out against rainy-day pop strumming, their gigs thrilled with lounge sax interludes, back-combed guitar blaze-outs and some ominous, light-show friendly beats.

Which is presumably why, five months after they sold out Brighton's Freebutt on the back of the initial buzz, people still care.

Although currently hailed as a fresh proposition in 2005's tip lists, this multi-instrumental six-piece have in fact been making darkly romantic music since the early Nineties - producing four albums' worth of rumbling operatics which never made it to these shores.

Back then, Lightburn was indeed a young Britpop obsessive, who would make trips to London's The Good Mixer with a bag of his demos, hoping to bump into Graham Coxon. But he was also the son of a preacher and quickly developed a knack for fusing elegant English pop with a certain apocalyptic grandeur - like, dropping to his knees on stage and screaming "there's no such thing as love".

"I definitely don't see us getting U2 status or anything," he says on reflection. "But it would be nice to have a Smiths-style career - that would be cool."

The Dears will be supported by Brooklyn's Ambulance Ltd, shoe-gazing revivalists who favour reverb-drenched riffs, and progressive Reading pop five-piece Pure Reason Revolution.

Starts 8pm, Tickets £9/£8, Tel 01723 673311