What: Operators with Astrocolor and Psychic Pollution
When: Friday, 9 p.m.
Where: Sugar Nightclub, 858 Yates St.
Tickets: $15 at bplive.electrostub.com and Lyle’s Place
While Dan Boeckner was in the studio recording with his band Wolf Parade last winter, he ducked out for time on the road with his other band, Operators.
Now, the script has been flipped.
“Wolf Parade is about to go on the road, and when I’m at home, I’ll be writing an Operators record,” Boeckner said Wednesday from his home in Montreal. “That’s kind of how I run it.”
The Lake Cowichan-born performer is rarely without a musical project on the go. Victoria-bred Wolf Parade was his primary focus until 2011, when the popular group temporarily disbanded. His side project, Handsome Furs, quickly became his full-time project, but when that group came to an end in 2012, he created Divine Fits with Britt Daniel of Spoon.
Life has been increasingly complicated for Boeckner since 2014, however. And though he’s been juggling Operators and Wolf Parade duties for the better part of the past year, he’s been more than happy to do so.
“My entire goal is to be able to work as much as possible,” he said. “It’s the Mike Watt thing: ‘If you’re not playing, you’re paying.’ I don’t think I’d want to have my career running any other way, really. It’s really important to be able to play various sizes of rooms in different places with different audiences.”
Boeckner will get his wish: Operators is finishing the touring cycle for its acclaimed debut, Blue Wave, with shows tonight in Victoria and tomorrow in Vancouver. A tour with Arcade Fire gets underway for Wolf Parade in September, followed by headlining of their own shows in October.
Boeckner, who moved back to Montreal just prior to the recent U.S. election, said fans of Wolf Parade will notice a distinctly political bent on some of the new songs on Cry Cry Cry, which is due Oct. 6. Societal strife was also evident on Blue Wave, which made sense — Boeckner was living in Silicon Valley during the writing of Operators’ debut album.
“Living in the tech center south of San Francisco really informed a lot of the Operators record. A lot of Blue Wave is sort of fearful of the future, and then that future came true when the United States decided to elect a f---ing clown for their president.”
He calls the “nihilistic politics” of the U.S. a real threat to humanity. Not only will his distaste be evident on the songs he wrote for Wolf Parade’s forthcoming fourth album, it won’t be hard to find on the next Operators album when that materializes, he said.
“There’s a real sense of end-times in North America right now. We feel it less in sa国际传媒, but you definitely feel it in the States. There’s a sense of disbelief. That’s what I want to be writing about, and what I have been writing about.”
Boeckner has been playing in bands for the majority of his adult life, dating back to the late 1990s, when he was in the Victoria group Atlas Strategic and working in the kitchen at The Bent Mast pub in James Bay (“That’s actually where Spencer [Krug] and I met,” he said of his fellow Wolf Parade co-founder.)
Over the years, his fondness for electronic music resulted in the formation of both Handsome Furs and Operators, whose moody electro-punk (which features drummer Sam Brown and keyboardist Devojka) has been called “melancholic electronic.” He always comes back to the sinewy indie rock of Wolf Parade, which gives him the best of both worlds artistically.
“When I first started running Handsome Furs and Wolf Parade simultaneously, there was a really weird dichotomy and gear-shift.
“I would come off these tours with Wolf Parade where we were playing 2,000-capacity rooms and go [with Handsome Furs] to Eastern Europe to play for 200 kids in Poland. That kind of thing was a bit jarring at first, but as time went on, I really got to appreciate that. And it benefits both projects. I can still learn something from playing a 200-capacity room and bring it to Wolf Parade.”