Hold your breath.  Ready?

I first heard of Operator Please when I was watching an episode of Jools Holland that I had tuned in to to see Liam Finn (which turned out to be the best performance of the night).  Stuck between Melody Gardot and The Pentangle were Operator Please.  A young, energetic five-piece with a violinist, a 12 year-old drummer (not really, but you couldn’t tell by looking at him) and a guitar-playing female singer dressed like you’d expect a female member of The Hives to dress.

Their sound and energy was enough to persuade me to download their debut album “Yes Yes Vindictive”,  released at the tail end of 2007 in their native Australia. Upon hearing the first few bars of opener “Zero! Zero!” you wouldn’t be wrong to think it was a cover of the Knightrider theme song (or a muscially inclined Bee trapped in an amp).   The pace is frantic and sets the mood for the rest of the album with singer Amandah Wilkinson singing with a fervor about an apparently ungratful, arguementative and ever-present boyfriend on most  of the songs.  On songs like “Get What You Want” she rather matter-of-factly states “I wish I could feed you some Ritalin/So maybe I could get a reaction or/Maybe even some facial expression/ But it’s not your fault if you really don’t wanna.”

Curiously the violin works.  “Curiously” because it’s not often that a guitar-based band without the backing of more than one stringed instrument can pull off the pairing, but Operator Please pull it off effortlessly.  On “Just A Song About Ping Pong” (which is, believe it or not, a song about ping pong) the violin cuts in and out, slowing down the furious pace at which the guitars and drums have been racing along behind handclaps and screams of “GO!”, only to pick right back up where it left off and ending leaving you wanting more than the 2:18 of it.  “Two For My Seconds” is the opposite, a pop lament led by a piano and with lyrics about blame and holding a grudge, sung with a smile.  It’s a nice change of pace from the energy of the previous tracks, but not for long as the song quickly ups tempo and catches you off guard.

Though Operator Please offer nothing new in terms of musical progression or unbridled talent, they definitely have what it takes to get you up on the Ian Curtis-inspired indie dance floor (you know, the one where you flail your arms and half-Ska), especially with songs like “Yes Yes” and “Terminal Disease”, the latter clocking in at a blistering 1:56.  Album closer “Pantomime” begins with a hardly-present guitar and Amandah singing softly “I’m on strings/So move me/March, march, march/ To the beat of no drums”.  Building up into a crescendo of guitars, bassy drums, piano and strings, it’s not how you’d expect the album to end upon listening to the first track.

They’ll likely draw comparisons to The Gossip and The D4, even CSS and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, but if they’re to shake those comparisons they’ll need to come up with something different, something magnetic to pull you in like “Get What You Want” and “Just A Song About Ping Pong”, especially when some of the songs on “Yes Yes Vindictive”seem to be recycled from the song before, or even from the b-sides of The Gossip.

With a yet to be announced album due out this year, here’s hoping they stick around long enough to prove me right, and wrong.

Oh, and you can breathe now.

6/10

Worth checking out: The D4, The Gossip

Buy “Yes Yes Vindictive” / Download “Yes Yes Vindictive”

Listen Before You Buy – “Yes Yes Vindictive”: