Geffen Records Angels & Airwaves from San Diego features, from left, drummer Adam "Atom" Willard, singer-guitarist Tom DeLonge, guitarist David Kennedy and bassist Matt Wachter.

A mostly high school crowd of about 600 demonstrated its good taste by showing up at the Majestic Ventura Theatre on a Tuesday night to check out a solid performance of Angels & Airwaves, a quartet out of San Diego driving around, stopping now and again to play a few songs off its two albums and, for this gig, almost the entire latest "I-Empire."

After the melodic noise from Meg & Dia, the pesky DJ showed bad timing skills by shouting out the usual "HowzitgoinVentura," etc., then elicited a big cheer for the headliners, which he said inexplicably would be out in a few — which turned out to be about 10 minutes.

OK, why not introduce the band right before the band starts playing? After all, do they introduce a song on the radio then give the listener 10 minutes of silent anticipation?

Angels & Airwaves is yet another cool band from San Diego, and is fronted by Tom DeLonge, formerly of pop punk kingpins Blink-182, a man who knows the most intimate secrets of his significant others, his audience.

Correctly assessing his clientele, DeLonge announced that there's three types of people at the show (and probably most any show). First, there's those who are totally into the band and totally get what they're trying to do; then there's those who came out because they may have heard something about the band and were curious; and the last group were those who just showed up because there was nothing better to do. Hey, it was Tuesday night after all.

Whenever DeLonge used the usual buzz words such as "Ventura" or "Howzitgoin'" or whenever he uplifted his palms, the crowd cheered on cue and also sang along in all the right places, generally with real religious fervor, and stood and swayed and bopped around throughout, helped in no small part by the sound man, who on this night was a master of his craft.

As the show progressed, DeLonge assumed all sorts of bizarre poses, freeze-framed now and again for effect, and did the prancing poser thing all over the stage, lest anyone forget whose band this truly was.

Nothing sinister, just kinda goofy.

Good thing he can sing.

DeLonge has that perfect corporate rock voice, always melodically belting out the lyrics over the big beat, wall-of-sound catchy tunes.

There was clearly no shortage of anthem-like sing-alongs such as "Rites of Spring," "Breathe" and the band's latest biggie, "Everything's Magic."

Bottom line is, these guys are really good and all four of them can really play.

And the light show was pretty cool as well. It didn't kick in until the middle, somewhere during "Secret Crowds," eliciting cheers — maybe only about 1 percent as dazzling as "Close Encounters," but about 100 times more surreal than the first season of "Star Trek."

Angels & Airwaves was sufficiently entertaining to inspire even cynical music writers to buy a $20 T-shirt, which, after one washing, will probably fit a cat.

— E-mail music writer Bill Locey at blocey@pacbell.net.