San Francisco – All venues are not created equally. The Constitution of this country will have you believe that we still hold the ideals of equality and the inherent right to happiness/prosperity/whatever in regards to all Americans, but that can’t be said of just about everything that falls under the American umbrella. While this terribly over-quoted, misquoted, and admittedly archaic document still resounds as the truest portrait of Americanism (in many peoples’ eyes), there is nothing within its lofty language that encompasses the well-being of America’s music venues. There are some pretty shitty ones, and the overall dissonance that echoes throughout their halls often reflects poorly on performances held within those walls, for the artists’ whose live shows fall prey to the shortcomings of these awful venues. Operators’ set at Social Hall SF this past weekend could have been one of those shows, had it not been for the prowess and fortitude of the performers.
Canada’s Operators is a new band put together by Dan Boeckner, the singer/guitarist/virtuoso known for his contributions to bands like Handsome Furs, Divine Fits (with Spoon’s Britt Daniel), and the magnificently bizarre indie outfit Wolf Parade, who just recently announced a reunion after an indefinite hiatus lasting the better part of a decade. I first encountered Operators at a Zola Jesus show about a year and a half ago, which took place at a club in North Beach called Bimbo’s. Bimbo’s is one of those places that has a two-drink minimum, and if you’re early enough, you can snag a table towards the back. I was sipping on a Manhattan, sitting across from an ad executive and her husband as they took the stage. After hearing a few verses, I turned towards the ad exec (wish I could remember her name), just as she was turning towards me, and we asked the same question of one another: “Is that Dan Beckoner?” I was so intrigued by the band’s brief opening set that I wanted to take some Operators music home with me… yet the only format of the band’s EP1 available was a cassette.
I never got the chance to hear the cassette, but since then that first EP has been digitized, and the band has just recently released its first LP, Blue Wave. Operators has been celebrating the release of the LP by touring behind it, stopping momentarily to thrill a crowd at one of San Francisco’s newest venues, the Goldenvoice-helmed Social Hall SF, which finds its home in the lower, almost subterranean space beneath the famed Regency Ballroom.
I have also been to the Social Hall on one other occasion – to see Neon Indian, just weeks after the venue was first opened to the public. The space itself is fantastic – the open floor plan keeps things comfortable and low-key, and there are a few rows of fold-out chairs that line the back of the audience. There are also a few couches scattered here and there, most notably to the right of the stage, just a few steps from the bar area that offers reasonably priced domestic canned beer that finds a new, more fitting home within the plastic cups they are tipped into. However, despite the venue’s sprawling layout, there is no photo pit, the stage is barely two feet tall, and the sound is atrocious. Similar complaints were lodged against the venue right around the time it opened – that Neon Indian show being one of the most cited instances – and unfortunately, not much has been improved. While the band was fantastic, the venue had some trouble containing the sound in a way that was detrimental to Boeckner & Company’s new style.
Somewhat appropriately, Operators followed a similar formula that Zola Jesus adhered to when I saw the band open for her two autumns ago: she used the live forum to perform her then-new LP Taiga in its sequential entirety; Operators did something quite similar. Since the band’s debut LP Blue Wave had just been released on the first of April, Operators spent all of the time given to highlight tracks from the LP… except the band didn’t quite follow sequence in the way that Zola Jesus had. Operators started out in such a fashion, treating the crowd to the first two songs off Blue Wave – “Rome” and “Control” – as if planning on simply powering through the album, front to back. Boeckner played guitar and sang and fiddled with knobs, while Operators’ bassist, keyboardist, and cacophonous drummer followed suit (the keyboardist was displeased with the lighting after “Rome,” so it was diminished for the remaining songs, which made one-half of my job – taking photographs – very difficult.
Operators’ Blue Wave is gloomy and punchy, much in the way Divine Fits and Wolf Parade are, but the instrumentation and obvious influences are much more nuanced than those pertaining to Wolf Parade. Wolf Parade is one of those bands that loves to fuck with timing and presentation, so it was interesting to see Boeckner address a more straightforward approach to music. “Rome” is an analog-driven number driven by 70s punk and lofty vocals, while “Control” lays down breezy synths early on that latch onto your attention and refuse to let go. It’s hard to say where Boeckner decided to embrace the electronic world; it might have been Divine Fits, his project with Spoon’s Britt Daniel that bubbles along with vibrant electronica, but maybe it’s the influence of his other band mates. Either way, it works. Especially during “Control,” which could be easily confused with a New Order B-Side.
From there on, Operators basked in the brisk unpredictability of the album’s material, which may be the reason they decided to digress from the track-by-track approach of the LP. The main set consisted only of the ten songs featured on Blue Wave, just in a completely mixed up order. After “Control” came the staggered, thumping percussion of “Mission Creep,” followed by the 80s-pop-ballad mentality of “Nobody.” Throughout the rest of the show, Boeckner bounced between singing, playing guitar, and fiddling with the knobs on his synthesizer, during which he would saunter up to his microphone to deliver a few solid lines of lyrics before almost shrinking back again.
The punky sounds of “Shape of Things” swiftly followed suit, coaxing Boeckner’s voice to climb out of its guttural wrath, straddling the rather broad line separating Dinosaur Jr. from Saturdays=Youth-era M83. The vocals of “Shape of Things” were almost completely intelligible, however, as the venue itself (not the act, if I may reiterate) does not seem to know how to play for a small-ish crowd such as the one in attendance that evening; the drums were mixed far too high, and the rest of the song was lost in a squall of percussion that bounced around the vast space like a typhoon on the loose. Things cleared up a bit – while staying on the more analog side of the spectrum – as they pressed through the album’s penultimate track “Evil,” but then turned more electronic during the pulsing LP title track “Blue Wave,” followed promptly by “Bring Me the Head,” which had Boeckner juggling synth AND guitar duties as he wailed into the microphone, offering up his best impressions of Robert Smith and Dave Gahan, respectively (though, truthfully, paired with electronic instrumentation, Boeckner easily sounds like some frenzied hybrid of the two).
At the tail end of the set came Operators’ single “Cold Light,” which has enjoyed some success on alternative/indie radio airwaves, and is most likely the reason many of the patrons attended the show in the first place, as this song has received the most enthusiastic response. Though, I obviously cannot say for sure. The band killed it with “Cold Light.” The bassline of that song has a tendency to plow through the ear and mind of whomever stands in its path, like some sort of sinister eel slithering through the measures. Boeckner’s vocals are distorted enough to keep the rest of the instrumentation buoyant in this icy sea, as his lyrics are oddly reassuring despite the song’s grittiness and overall bleak timbre. The band closed down the main set with album finale “Space Needle,” a track that starts off subtle yet shifts abruptly to some Black Keys-esque acid trip of a song, much more akin to Boeckner’s Wolf Parade roots than most of Blue Wave’s tracks, though still not reaching the sort of vocal mania that he boasted on some earlier LPs. The encore took on two songs from the band’s aforementioned first release, 2014’s EP1, the peppery “Ancient,” followed by EP opener “True,” one of the more astutely mixed songs of the evening… and thank God, because that song is killer, and to mess up the levels of that track would just be criminal!
Although I didn’t get to listen to EP1 until months after I bought the cassette at that Zola Jesus show in 2014 (I actually have still never listened to it; I had to find a digital copy online), I knew that the band was going to be a pretty big deal after seeing Operators live that night, and it wasn’t just because Dan Boeckner had already secured a reputation of helming awesome and continuously inventive musical endeavors. Honestly, it puzzled me that I had never heard of Operators – or at least that I didn’t know that Boeckner was a part of it – before that show, because usually I’m pretty good at keeping up with that kind of stuff. What was even more surprising is that basically everyone else in attendance that night was as astonished as I was. But then, basically nothing happened with Operators for so long. All I had was that cassette I bought that night. Eventually, I sort of forgot about Operators, until I heard the band on the radio a few months back and decided to check back in. I’m glad I did.
EP1 and Blue Wave are completely different entities from one another, with only a fairly small amount of overlap. EP1 is much more in the tradition of Boeckner’s then-most recent project Divine Fits, a lot of which stems from 80s dark-wave and early synth pop, while blending the paired influences of Boeckner and his cohort Britt Daniel. Blue Wave dips into a lot of electronic sounds here and there, but there is also a healthy dose of torn-jeans/bloody-fingertips-type analog rock that staggers the LP, allowing the listener to experience the peaks and valleys of technological influence in a way that leaves room for the appreciation of both styles individually and as a chemical solution. Watching Boeckner and his three bandmates last weekend was a treat to behold, and for much of the set, the audience really surrendered to the sound. However, unfortunately for the band, the venue was not up to snuff, and a lot of the band’s message was lost amongst the polished floors and empty archways that littered the overly magnanimous space. I have faith that on the remainder of the tour Operators will (hopefully) be housed in more sutiable environments, but sadly these poorly structured spaces exist in every city (don’t even get me started on NYC’s Terminal 5). Luckily, Operators’ boisterous and nuanced sound was able to reach us all that night – to one degree or another – and in the close quarters the audience was able to witness true artistry at work. Both releases put forth by Operators are worth listening to, and if given the right venue, the band is definitely worth seeing live.
Operators’ Blue Wave arrived earlier this month and is now available via Last Gang. The band is in the midst of an intimate North American tour, that will last till the end of April. For more information and for tour dates, visit the Operators’ Facebook page.
Photography by Corey Bell for Best New Bands.
Corey Bell
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